#Chronically Creative

[artbyleoniejonk]

I've been working on some new sticker designs. Some affirmations for tired people cause I think we can always use some friendly affirmations 🥹  Which ones should I finish? 🧐

[thecrippledcryptid]

🐾 Ribs, Ribbons, and Rabbit Ears: Belated Gotcha Day Joy

Okay, so I might be running a little behind on this post—but when you’re juggling chronic illness, pup training, and whispering life back into an entire blog (👀), sometimes the celebrations take the front seat while the writing waits its turn. That said… Bear’s 11th Gotcha Day was on April 13th, and there was no way I was going to let the day slip by without celebrating my couch-loving,…

[nondelphic]

writers who make playlists before writing anything scare me. how are you setting a mood for something that doesn’t exist yet. are you conjuring it. are you a witch.

[rhiandoesfandom]

Me: I'm feeling so creative today! I wanna draw, I wanna write, I wanna create! I wanna play games!

My disability: mhmm thats great but I have strict plans for you to have a six hour long migraine where you're crying in bed and so nauseous you can't eat anything. Sooooooo.

[eminthegrave]

Anybody else keep having to search up words you learnt from reading just to make sure it means what you think? Cus I just had to search up the word perturbed cus I only had the feeling of the word.

in means feeling anxious or unsettled btw.

[carabiner-pansy]

SUPER GRAPHIC ULTRA MODERN🪩🩵my take on one of my faveeee chappell songs! arrtx acrylic marker, uniball white gel pens, and glitter foam letters on a piece of recycled cardboard wrapped in hot pink paper i robbed from uni x

[jokingmaiden]

why yes, i DO want to engage in an activity i enjoy solely for the sake of enjoying it. but unfortunately, my brain heard me say “i want to do [thing]” and took personal offense to the idea of being told what to do as if my desires are some kind of command, and now i’m paralyzed on my bed begging my body to do literally anything

[ghostinkpoetry]

"A Quiet Emergency"

It starts again— a fist clenched around my chest, not metaphor, not myth, but a pain sharp enough to name gods after. A dagger draped in silence, twisting between ribs as if searching for something it lost.

I say it hurts, and she replies you're just anxious, like that word is lighter, like it weighs less than the ache that leaves me breathless in the dark.

They all tell you: Speak up. Share. Don’t suffer in silence. But when I do, the world hands me soft denials wrapped in smiles— a phase, a feeling, a thought.

They say it's in my head as my heart plays percussion against the walls of my body, each beat a scream I’m not allowed to voice.

There is no ambulance for the kind of pain you cannot prove.

So I sit— a still life in a storm, my tears soundless, so I don’t disturb the peace of those who believe pain only matters when it draws blood they can see.

I break quietly, in rooms filled with light, while everyone tells me you look fine.

@ghostinkpoetry

[seraphsfire]

any other spoonies or people with fibro/chronic fatigue/myalgic encephalomyletis/adhd/etc start just *trying* to think of the steps to a complex mental task have an immediate brain shutdown and get sleepy/fatigued/feel drugg/ed and physically exhausted immediately after doing so bc i feel like im going crazy and googling/duckduckgo-ing yeilded only like, mayo clinic articles defining chronic fatigue so. lol

[lovenliterature]

soft by choice

Whenever people praise me for being resilient, it feels strange Because, sure, I’ve survived every challenge, weathered every storm But can I tell you a secret?

I’m not certain all of me made it I didn’t make it through unscathed I survived because I didn’t have a choice

I am resilient out of necessity I stay soft and kind by choice

[thecrippledcryptid]

🐾 Ribs, Ribbons, and Rabbit Ears: Belated Gotcha Day Joy

Okay, so I might be running a little behind on this post—but when you’re juggling chronic illness, pup training, and whispering life back into an entire blog (👀), sometimes the celebrations take the front seat while the writing waits its turn. That said… Bear’s 11th Gotcha Day was on April 13th, and there was no way I was going to let the day slip by without celebrating my couch-loving,…

[nondelphic]

every time i try to write a serious and likeable male character he ends up acting like ksi doing a cheap vs expensive video and he's on the cheap team

[ferns-shenanigans]

Fatigue weighs in my bones like led, it curls in my chest, making itself at home, it spreads throughout my limbs like water splashing onto shore, except it’s not peaceful, though it does come in waves.

Sometimes I’ll be alright, the shoreline has receded, and the sand is exposed, but I am not, and it’s as if things might be okay. Then a storm comes, the tides become choppy, the water murky, the sky dark, and it’s as if all progress has been lost, it’s as if I’ve always been dragged down by the storm, the riptide, and there is no escape from it, and it’s all I’ve ever known.

There are times between these two extremes, times where the water isn’t as rough but the sky is dim, or times where the shore has receded yet the waves continue to crash hard; the only thing that stays the same is the uncertainty of it all, and despite everything I am fighting, fighting against the tides and the rain and the sand, fighting against the storms and the waves, fighting to take control, but what is the opposite of control if not the ocean?

[eminthegrave]

I realised that plot holes are only holes because you keep forgetting to repair them. If you actually sew them up with a bunch of made up shit occasionally, then they won't get so big. I somehow made my world building make sense by just adding reasons why its like that.

Why doesn't anyone know about the other plains of the dodecahedron? well obviously it's because everyone thinks you just fall off the edge and whatever you see after that is The After Life. You know, folklore and totally not a complete plot hole with an half arsed explanation slapped on top.

[golyadkin]

Since I've talked on here some about my chronic pain, I've decided to share a personal essay I wrote for my creative writing class last semester about my experiences with the medical system during my attempts to get diagnosed and treated. It's called...

Weird Body

My physiotherapist diagnosed me with having a weird body. We were doing squats together one day in the communal gym between the offices and I told him it was a little more difficult for me because my hips are double-jointed. Confused, Adam asked me what I meant.

            I planted my feet and locked my knees, and started popping my hip in and out of its socket. You could hear it clearly, the quiet thuck, thuck, thuck, but through gym shorts it was hard to see. “What am I looking at?” he asked, and I invited him to come put his hand on my hip. When I did it again his eyes went wide. “What’s happening?” he said. “What are you doing?”

            “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’ve always been able to do that.”

            “Can I examine you?” he said, and together we went into his office.

            My old physiotherapist didn’t have an office that I ever saw. Instead, we would talk in the gym area while other patients rode on stationary bikes in the corner and she would tell me the pain that lived down the right side of my spine was because I wasn’t trying hard enough. The only time we ever got alone together was in a curtained off area where I would remove my shirt and she would massage my back.

            ‘If it hurts that bad,’ I would think with tears in my eyes, ‘then it probably needs the attention,’ and so I would let her palpate my bad rib until I almost couldn’t breathe. It would be another few years before I learned that the rib she was pushing on was permanently sprained and shouldn’t have been stimulated at all. It would be a different doctor who would push my spine from side to side and tell me it had too much give, and I would wonder how the woman massaging my naked back didn’t notice.

            In Adam’s office, there was a desk and chairs and even an examination table. He told me to lie on my back. Once I was comfortably situated on the paper topper, he took my ankle in his hands and raised it up so that my thigh rose at a right angle from my body and my knee was bent forward like I was taking a large step. Then, slowly, he began to rotate my leg. His face lit up and I watched him with growing concern and curiosity.

            “Most people,” he told me, “can go about 90° from side to side. You’ve got nearly double that.” The movement he was testing is called ‘passive hip rotation.’ I would google it that night. Adam didn’t tell me the technical name, he only continued to rotate my leg slowly, fascinated by the give, and showed me how far he could move it before my hip began to resist.

            This wasn’t the first time he’d been surprised by my body. In one of our first sessions together I told him that I often cracked my back over park benches while working at High Park when the pressure in my spine got to be too much. He asked to see how I did it and after I showed him he told me that I had just subluxated both my shoulders. He asked me if it had hurt and I told him no, it was easy. It felt good, in fact. This baffled and amazed him, much like my hip.

            He let me get off the examination table, the paper crinkling back into wrinkled place, and he led me back out into the gym with renewed enthusiasm that I didn’t really understand. He seemed excited by this new aspect of my anatomy. It was another charming novelty that didn’t really mean anything to him other than I was different from his usual patients. It was a sports clinic, after all, so most of his patients were jocks recovering from injuries sustained on the field. Not many of them were born damaged like me.

            I never met any of his other patients, though. There was rarely anyone else in the gym when we were there, and if they were then Adam and his coworker would ignore each other while the other patient and I would make eye contact like strange dogs on opposite sides of the street, stuck on leashes but desperate to know more.

            On this day we were alone. “You’ve got a lot going on,” he told me as we arrived back at the blue exercise mats. “Nothing to be worried about, though. You’ve just got a weird body.”

            A weird body.

            It’s not something you ever want to hear a medical professional say, but at the time it was the closest thing I had to a diagnosis. It would be another few months before any doctor would put it all together, not long after Adam told me there was nothing more he could do for me. Just like the last physiotherapist had.

            Usually, however, they would put it in cleaner terms. Lots of bodies are weird in harmless ways. When a body is weird within the usual parameters they call it ‘idiopathic’ and leave it off your chart because at the end of the day it doesn’t mean anything. They don’t connect the idiopathic things because they’re normal, even if they are weird. It takes investigation that they’re not trained for to figure out that there’s even a puzzle to which these pieces belong.

            The only doctor who ever did figure it out was a specialist who only ever met me once and in that one meeting he told me three things:

I was too young to be there.

I was too healthy to be there.

He knew what was wrong with me, but he would not help me.

            By this point the pain was bad enough to qualify me for ketamine infusions. To have a metal rod inserted into my shoulder to shock a nerve into submission. To wear braces on my knees and back that I had to buy cheap at Shoppers because no doctor wanted me to rely on them. But I wasn’t in bad enough shape to be his patient and so he would not write down the diagnosis in my chart. He would not even allow what he told me to be called a diagnosis.

            I would tell two separate nurses at my final pain clinic what he had said about my joints, why everything hurt all the time, why my body was weird. Both nurses decided not to put it on the chart, one because, “There’s nothing we could do about that,” and the other because, “Sometimes things look like something else.” At my last appointment at this clinic I would walk into a room of five doctors I’d never met before who had decided to work together to figure out what was wrong with me because, in spite of me telling them, they couldn’t figure it out.

            It wasn’t entirely their fault. For all the things that were wrong with me, none of them really escaped the realm of ‘idiopathic,’ and so none of it got written down. And when things don’t get written down they disappear. It gets tiring to tell people the same thing over and over again when you know it doesn’t go anywhere so eventually you learn to accept it and move on.

            In the gym with Adam, before I really knew anything, we both got down on our stomachs on the exercise mats and together we planked—an exercise that was meant to strengthen my core and improve my posture. “I like exercising with my more in-shape clients,” Adam told me, his biceps bulging as mine trembled. “It’s a free workout.”

            I gasped out a polite laugh and grit my teeth. It was difficult not to resent the dismissiveness of the comment. These exercises weren’t enjoyable to me, they were a means of survival. And even when I was keeping up with them and doing them regularly, the exercises were hard. No matter how hard I tried, it always hurt.

            “That’s what you have to expect with chronic pain conditions like this,” he would tell me two weeks later. It would be the first time a medical professional ever called what I had a chronic pain condition and I would spend the whole trip home trying not to cry on the subway. Not because I didn’t know that it was a chronic pain condition, but because it was official now. Adam wasn’t a doctor, but in my mind he was close enough, and at that point he was the first medical professional to not say it was my fault. That counted for a lot.

            ‘Chronic pain condition,’ didn’t go on my chart either. Officially the only thing wrong with me was mild scoliosis and anything else was simply idiopathic. A blip in normalcy. The pain I was feeling in my ribs and arms and ankles and knees wasn’t because of anything medically wrong with me, at least nothing serious. It wasn’t anything they could diagnose without dusting all the pieces off and noticing they fit together, and so to them there was nothing to diagnose. It wasn’t anything real, I just had a weird body.

[witchygirlgray333]

Journal prompts / ideas

Poems (either ones you've written or just ones you enjoy or connect with)

Book review

Film review

Write about your day

Collage

Vision board

Habit tracker

Calendar page

Notes from something you're learning

Quotes you like

Draw some outfits you like

Search up creative writing prompts and do those

Meditate and write down your thoughts before / during / after (I don't do this everytime or sometimes I'll only write afterwards but when I write before, during and after it's always really interesting to read back on and see how much has changed)

Stickerbomb page

Films to watch

Books to read

Wishlist

Bucket list

Highlight of the day (I like to have a page in my journal where I write a short sentence of my favourite thing that happened that day, it's nice to look back on and it's nice especially for days when I'm not feeling well enough to do a longer entry)

Gratitude list

Random thoughts

Drawings and sketches (I'm not even good at drawing but I love drawing or sketching in my journals and just expressing myself)

This one is more for chronically ill people but making notes for doctor / hospital appointments which helps so much! I have severe memory loss so a lot of the time I'll turn up to an appointment and have totally forgotten about anything I'd hoped to say so this has been a total lifesaver

Along with what I said in my last point about living with severe memory loss my whole journal works towards helping me deal with living with the memory loss. I'll probably do another post soon about more in depth ideas for journaling to help life with memory loss but I write down SO MUCH. I've got to do lists, a calendar page, my night routine (I'll also have my morning routine written down once I've actually worked one out!), things I need to do everyday (such as brushing my teeth, washing my face etc), contact info for people I'm close to, labelled photos of my loved ones (it can be really scary when I don't recognise people so having these pages really help), a list of things I can do throughout the day (I'm on bedrest but having a list of things that I enjoy doing written down is a nice reminder, some of the things on the list at the moment are make tiktok videos, do makeup, watch a movie or tv show, journal, scrapbook etc)