This all looks so goooooood!

For real for real tho

Disability isn’t what i would choose if I had been given the choice. It has given me indescribable physical and existential pain and made my body foreign to me. But my body is still where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to love.

onbeing.org/poetry/the-h...

I connect through safety, intimacy, warmth, and reciprocity- things I used to experience solely in my own body and, later, with a partner and eventually, with my community. Now, constant pain is an entity I must listen to and navigate, appease, create a home within.

I regularly test for EBV, COVID, and other viruses to ensure my body isn’t under invisible attack. I suffer from recurring UTIs, cellulitis, hives, and other painful maladies. Constant pain creates distance between me and my body bc I don’t connect through pain.

Things I can easily do one day are completely out of reach the following days/weeks/months so that I can never quite settle in to my own body’s rhythms. I have to pay constant attention to biometric units like HR, HRV, & lactate levels.