There’s a very unique feeling that I’ve come to associate with our new normal now that we’re social distancing long-term and I don’t seem to be alone in this feeling.
It’s the feeling of continuously large, emotional reactions getting squished into a manageable package so that I can function in day to day life. It’s a sense that there is a constant threat surrounding me, followed by a layer of all-encompassing grief and compassion fatigue, all of which is smothered by a blanket of avoidance, dismissal, and critical judgment of myself for struggling when “there’s nothing wrong.” …
I live in Eugene, Oregon, and as of the writing of this post, Covid19 isn’t here yet, at least, not on paper. Between how easy it is for the virus to go undetected and how limited our access to testing is, statistically, it’s probably already here. Oregon currently has 38 confirmed cases, and had its first confirmed death as a result of Covid19, a few days ago. Things have been calm here, relatively speaking.
However, on Wednesday, March 11th, reports about the severity of the situation in Italy came in and shit started to happen. Governor Kate Brown first issued…
This article is not about Warren. It’s also not about Sanders or Biden, or even, this election.
One of the things that systemic oppression does to you regardless of where you are in the system is warp your sense of what is normal. We see everything through a filter that obscures the fact that a lot of structures that we see as totally neutral actually don’t make any sense. Very few people want to see their actions as being influenced by bigotry so of course, if we’re asked to explain why we make a biased and illogical decision, we’ll always…
Focus is precious and elusive and it seems to be something that everyone is pursuing in order to streamline our time management. For some of us, clarity of mind is harder to access than for others.
Being part of the chronic illness community, “Brain fog” is a term that’s thrown around quite frequently. It describes a state of mental fuzziness, poor memory, and difficulty processing information that’s often a side effect of system-wide health issues. But for most of my chronically ill life, I wasn’t really sure what it felt like.
However, at the beginning of this summer, I got…
But I have to make a choice between scrutiny and erasure.
CN: general discussion of chronic pain, casual ableism, and specific details of health problems
If you met me in person without any prior introduction and I told you I was disabled, you would be confused. Even if you were somewhat familiar with the range of disabilities that exist, which many abled people are not (there is more to disability than wheelchairs and white canes) it would be pretty difficult for you to pick up just by looking at me that my body operates in a fundamentally different way from abled bodies.
My body looks like a healthy body. I have…
A note from a coworker made me wonder if EDS was the reason my body acted differently.
This piece was originally published on YoppVoice.com as “The Blue Book” in May 2017.
content notes: chronic pain, ableism, images of mild body contortions
I sat down at the bus stop. There were still a few minutes before my bus was due to arrive so I grabbed the book my physical therapist had given me that morning out of my bag. I opened the book with a blue cover and a large orange flower on the front, skipped past the acknowledgments and intro and stumbled on to “Suggested Evaluations for the Primary Caregiver.” …
Consider the following questions:
What information do you need to store so that you can easily switch between available for day to day use and tucked out of sight until you need it?
What problems could benefit from a visual and dynamic method to manipulate the information you have in order to arrive at a solution?
Which ideas would be better understood if they were sorted into categories and subcategories?
If you had reminders for each step of your most detail-oriented tasks, would it improve your level of accuracy and speed with which you completed them?
How could you grow…
I’m a list-maker. I am always organizing my tasks, schedules, valued info, thoughts, and writing ideas in the form of lists. Breaking down a project into lots of little parts ensures that I don’t forget anything and it just feels so good to follow a straight forward line of information that gets you where you to need to be.
The perfect list to me is one that is intuitively organized, clearly formatted, easy to understand at a glance, contains just enough information but not too much, and that consists of completable items that you cross of with a satisfying swish…
Kella Hanna-Wayne
Creator & writer for the social justice blog www.yoppvoice.com | Articles on disability, chronic illness, mental health, and self-improvement.
