J.S
J.S – is a chronically ill and disabled writer and researcher on sexuality, bodies, and violence. They are also really 1red.
The loneliest year of my life
I am si’ng in the toilet contempla1ng. It’s Saturday a9ernoon, early a9ernoon.
S1ll a lot of day lying ahead. Unplanned and empty. Glooming self-doubts and ridicule in it. The 1k tok of „what are your plans? “ in every movement of the clock. Who’s listening?
The streets outside are busy. People walking by carrying bags of groceries. Their dogs on a leash. Their friends on their arm. Determined. Right on path.
I change the room, lying in bed I become aware of, painfully aware, of my own new household habits. Why didn’t I pick up the bundle of socks of the floor? They were grey socks bundled up in each other and turned insides out in the process. The green and red rings shown in a distorted and bulging paLern. White frizzled trapezoids in between. I got lost in watching them from my bed. Contempla1ng on the cultural prac1ce of folding socks and its meaning for society. Wondering if they would need to be washed again. If they picked up too much dust. When I vacuumed, I vacuumed around them. Thinking „I really need to pick those up “.
My house seemed riddled with things on the floor. Yet I lacked any memory of how they ended up there.
The floor seemed like an unconquerable terrain. I lost my stability standing on it. I could no longer reach toward it without hesita1on. Pulling up became a task of considera1ons. My internal debate o9en ending with my pain gaining the upper hand.
I started pushing the findings of the floor under one dresser. A collec1on of tampons, calling cards of doctors, socks, lighters, packaging leaflets, pens, combs, empty pill packaging.
For a while I thought I’d stay this way. That this would be forever, if not this then an even worse version of it
I conquered by organising. Millions of papers and documents that would make me, by assigning me helpless, help me.
I only had to be faster than the sickness to work it out.
I don’t trust my body.
My body and i, can you even say it that way
Corporal reali1es made true through language.
Descrip1ons of corporeality lie in front of me like bricks. I change the language; I switch the words around. Some sound similar. Neuropathy
I like to spiral in different languages; it allows me to organise my thoughts. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the mul1tudes of meanings. The languages I learned. I learned these words consciously. They carry my own meaning first, what I lay in them. Reduc1on helps.
My mind is a cloud. Nothing seems to be solid. Liquid thoughts drip through me. Some s1ck.
I talk to my friend. She’s pregnant. She tells me know she is like me, because pregnant people don’t go out much either. What an equa1on.
No one called me gleefully a9er My diagnosis. No one brought
joyful balloons to the hospital bed.
The chronic ill, especially young, disturb us.
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