When Illness Becomes the Way: Stoicism as a Way through Chronic Illness and Disability

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This essay was originally published by Classical Wisdom after winning their Stoic Essay Writing Contest in 2022. You can read the original post here.

What happens to each of us is ordered. It furthers our destiny.

Marcus Aurelius[1]

We never know when our lives might be changed suddenly and irrevocably. 2015 was one of the most successful years of my career as a multidisciplinary artist and vocal coach. I was teaching privately and at our local university and collaborating with several other performing artists. My largest project was writing and performing libretto and music for an upcoming dance opera. After a three week intensive with the dance opera company, my collaborator came down with a virus. I gently hugged her aching body and said goodbye. The next day I was sick. I still haven’t recovered.

Stoicism has been of great help in managing my mental and physical health while living with chronic illness. I also believe Stoicism has the potential to shift how society views those disabled by chronic illness—from burdens to human beings capable of flourishing—and to offer the support necessary to make that happen.

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Opulent Mobility: a group show in LA

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I’m very honoured to have two pieces included in this year’s Opulent Mobility show! Opulent Mobility is an international annual exhibit that asks artists to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. It imagines a world where disability is celebrated instead of denied, ignored, and feared. These exhibits are curated by founder A. Laura Brody and disability arts activist and photographer Anthony Tusler and include art and artworks from across the country and around the globe. 

On the top left, a profile of a pale skinned woman with a breathing tube and butterflies attached to her cheeks. Below is a red maple leaf with gold text reading Sacrifice the Weak. On the right a woman painted white with a white head bandage crouches at the bottom of a triangular ladder heading towards a tiny door. White text reads Opulent Mobility 2024 at the Los Angeles Maker, 260 S. Los Angeles St, LA, CA 90012, Celebrate disability in all its forms. Artworks: Breathe by Patricia Fortlage, Pandemic Eugenics by Megan Bent, and Barriers by Bronte Grimm.
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the wandering ghost

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I completed my largest embroidery to date—the wandering ghost—in June. The stitched area is 53 x 21 cm (21 x 8.5 inches).

An image of an old engraving of a vagus nerve is embroidered on green cotton. The gut is in a large bamboo embroidery hoop. The embroidery of the main nerve lines is done in blue chain stitch in perlé cotton. The brain and some of the face is stitched in the same thread in backstitch. Details in the face are stitched in single strand floss. A bright red anatomical heart is stitched in red whipped back stitch. Around it a bright golden yellow halo in a vesica piscis shape is stitched in single strand thread. Three sets of ribs have are stitched in bright green/yellow stem stitch. There are some tiny details in different colours along some of the nerves. Burgundy roiling with sparse tiny black French knots are stitched in the gut area. The nerve endings in the diaphragm area are lengthened with one and two strand whipped back stitch. Lia’s initials are stitched in green thread in the bottom right.

Clean up took a lot more time than usual because the chalk pencil I used was especially stubborn to wash out of the cotton and I wanted to wet block instead of iron it which took a bit of figuring out since that’s a new process for me. But it is done! Aside from cleanup I worked on it from June 14, 2023 to June 12, 2024. An entire year.

Read on for more about my process for this piece.

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The Visceral Self Writing Intensive

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In April I started a 12-week writing intensive called The Visceral Self with Jeannine Ouellette of Writing in the Dark over on Substack. This intensive was a bit more intense than I anticipated and made me realize that I really need to do things at my own speed. I started off participating fully but had trouble keeping up with the extra reading, and then par­ticipating in the comment section fell by the wayside, then I had an infection that meant writing and reading weren’t possible at all for a couple weeks so I had to accept that just doing the main exercises on my own time was all I could manage. I felt that I was missing out by posting things late and not really participating in the comments, but my disability means I have to choose what works for me both physically and cognitively.

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I’m on the PEM Podcast!

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A couple months ago I had the honour of being interviewed by Daniel Moore for the podcast Post-Exertional Mayonnaise. The name of the podcast is a play on Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM), the hallmark symptom of ME/CFS.

Daniel and I had a wide-ranging discussion and talked about whether its possible to flourish whilst living with ME, making art with a disability, flow states, symptomatology, meditation, and Stoicism.

You can also listen on your favourite podcast platform via the PEM Podcast webpage.

Opera Mariposa Benefit 2024

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I’m excited to announce that I’m a featured artist in Opera Mariposa’s 2024 Benefit + Awareness Month! 🦋 I’m honoured to share both art and music to support the ME | FM Society of BC and raise awareness for those affected by ME/CFS, Long Covid, and Fibromyalgia. Join me for this all-online charity extravaganza at Benefit.OperaMariposa.com from May 1 – June 1, 2024. There’s music, art, over $3,500 in prizes and more – and it’s all for a great cause!

Violet, blue and teal graphic featuring a side profile of a young Asian woman with her hand upheld, a purple butterfly hovering above it. The background features translucent torn strips of paper twined with blue watercolour flowers. Gauzy purple and blue text reads, Opera Mariposa 2024, May 1 - June 1. Benefit + Awareness Month for the ME | FM Society of BC. Smaller dark blue lettering features the URL Benefit.OperaMariposa.com above a globe icon next to the words All online; a spoon icon next to the words self-paced; a closed captioning icon next to the word English; and a dollar icon next to the words By donation and free.
Collage by Christina Baltais. Design by Stephanie Ko

I’m involved in the benefit in a few ways. Read on for how my music and embroidery are being featured!

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The Hum

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The album cover for The Hum. It reads: The Hum. Lia Pas. The image is of Lia's embroidery, "sensorium" with a purple navy tinge and dark purple navy bars on either side. In the centre of some bone white linen, there is a spine in thick satin stitch. Emanating from the spine are thick burgundy lines in an undulant oval shape. This oval is bisected across the middle. In the top half, there is a section outlined in burgundy filled with coiling blue lines and a similar section in the bottom half. The rest of the undulant oval is filled with fine coiling burgundy lines. The spine is very straight, the rest of the embroidery is very coiled and busy. Lia’s initials are stitched in fine thread the same colour as the cloth at the bottom right.

I have completed The Hum—a piece of music based on my hyperacusis and tinnitus symptoms. It’s just over 11 minutes long, and is a calm, ambient, and somewhat minimalist piece. Here is a 1 minute, 20 second taste of the recording:

You can buy the entire 11 minute recording on my Ko-fi page as an mp3.

Read on for more information about my long and gentle music reintegration and composition process for this piece.

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Nov ’23 to Feb ’24: Renewal and Propagation

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It’s been a challenging three months. Winter is always hard on my system and I’ve been getting all my vaccines up to date which has required a fair bit of recovery time. I also found out my cyborg part (an iliac vein stent) needs an adjustment so I’m waiting for a date for day surgery. But, because creative work is what makes me flourish, I’ve done a surpri­sing amount of work in that time.

In December I realized that my routines weren’t working well and were causing me a lot of unnecessary internal urgency so I totally scrapped them and rebuilt them from scratch. It took about a month of trial and error but I now have routines that work so much better for where I’m at cognitively, physically, and with my current projects. My music work is a bit more spaced out now, as is my journaling, but the internal striving and pressure I felt with my old routines is gone.

I do think the impetus for such a large shift is due to my continuing research on the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory. Urgency activates the sympathetic (stress, fight, flight) system, and reducing that means I can come back to ventral vagal (calm and engaged) much more readily which is very good for my entire system.

Embroidery WIPs

An image of an old engraving of a vagus nerve is embroidered on green cotton. The head and chest are in a large bamboo embroidery hoop. The embroidery of the main nerve lines is done in blue chain stitch in perlé cotton. The brain and some of the face is stitched in the same thread in backstitch. Details in the face are stitched in single strand floss. A bright red anatomical heart is stitched in two and one strand red whipped back stitch. Around it a bright golden yellow halo in a vesica piscis shape is stitched in single strand thread. Three sets of ribs have been sketched in chalk and the lowest and second lowest ribs are being stitched in bright green/yellow stem stitch. A needle minder in the shape of an hourglass that reads, "This is taking forever," sits near the stitches holding a needle.
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