
A place for stories about chronic illness, disability, mental health, and neurodivergence.

Most people assume that if you only know one language, that language was easy to learn. English and I still battle.

It’s about mouth breathers, gum chewers, pen clickers, foot tappers

Years of tedious fighting with Pain I now tread the boundaries between

“Our love laid thick and bitter on my tongue/I choked it down as not to spit/I laughed so not to lunge.”


Poet and retired physical therapist Barbara Brooks writes a poem about the S curve of her spine, the pain that comes with it, and the peace that comes with knowing there is nothing she can do to change it.

For people like Caitlin Thomson and her family, a societal lack of COVID precautions is even more isolating than the early stages of the pandemic.

“When I question my upbringing,/my therapist draws a peak./Tells me all religions glimpse/different angles of the same structure.”

In his prose poem, survivor Phil Scearce writes about what it’s like to live after recovering from cancer.

“Her dying happened in slow motion, like in a/dream you know is a dream but you/can’t wake up from.”