Tag Archives: mecfs

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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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.

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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Monthlyish Update: Getting Guts in Order (late Sept to early Nov)

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Note: This has been cross-posted on my ko-fi. There are a few other monthly updates there if you would like to read back a few months.

Webinar Report

Another monthly-ish update and another very full month. The main creative work on my plate was teaching a webinar for CHASE Medical Humanities about the visualization process I use to create my symptomatology pieces as well as how to use the poetic technique of homophonic translation to re-vision and re-own dense scientific texts.

It felt good to stretch my teaching muscles again. I’ve been teaching in some capacity since my late teens—music, yoga, and meditation—but had to stop when I got sick in 2015. Despite an ME/CFS crash the day before, I was well enough to present my webinar and the par­ticipants seemed to enjoy and get a lot out of the work. A few people even shared their symptomatology image/test pieces on social media. Here are a few:

crayon drawing of a body with photocopied esophagus, awkward poem and a bunch of triangles

Gillian Blekkenhorst started with a trachea and expanded their piece from there.

website: https://blekkenhorst.ca/

Twitter: @gblekkenhorst

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SciArt September 2023

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I’ve been participating in SciArt September for a few years now. Glendon Mellow and Liz Butler came up with some excellent prompts yet again this year, and I shared older work based on the prompts. Below are all 30 days of my posts!

Banner for the Sci Art September art challenge. The banner features a sketch of a mantis shrimp, as an example of art to create during the event. It also features the following text: Hashtag Sci Art September. Month-long art challenge. Following that is the 30-word prompt list, included here: 1 Starry, 2 Battle, 3 Favourite, 4 Cold-Blooded, 5 Strangling, 6 Understory, 7 Indigo, 8 Simian, 9 Heart, 10 Gossamer, 11 Lyrical, 12 Overgrowth, 13 Carmine, 14 Glowing, 15 Bird-like, 16 Ochre, 17 Abstract, 18 Talon, 19 Charcoal, 20 Sweet, 21 Misty, 22 Nocturnal, 23 Adornment, 24 Metallic, 25 Alchemical, 26 Threads, 27 Amethyst, 28 Monumental, 29 Tale, 30 Rebirth. After the list is the following text: Hosted by @FlyingTrilobite and @LizLagomorph. Year 3, September 2023.
An embroidery on ochre linen, there is the outline of a head and outstretched arms. Tiny blue filigree decorates the face and hands and there are light coloured stars on the chest area and around the neck.

Day 1: starry 

stars within, stars without (2017) is part of my symptomatology embroidery series. This is a map of the paresthesias (tingling) in my upper body due to ME/CFS, stitched as I experienced them.

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