Entering My 28th Year

On birthdays, rest, and cycles.

As I begin my 28th journey around the sun, I find myself sitting in gratitude for the life that I have, a life wholly unlike any life I’ve ever been able to imagine myself, one full of friends and community, beauty and purpose, care and wonder. This year more than most it feels like my birthday is a true day of declaration: I’m still here.

It feels like a cycle has ended this year, one which started 5 years prior during a year in which I was bed bound more often than not, enduring unbearable endometriosis symptoms, living with several chronic infections, and struggling with unmanaged emotional pain. My life had been so completely disrupted by illness. Relationships and friendships ended, I lost the ability to live independently, my job, my apartment, the life I had carved out for myself after college, and I found myself suspended in a ruptured life.

5 years ago, I had just turned 23 and was fighting off an upper respiratory infection which would turn into sepsis a month later, the lasting effects of which I carry with me in a chronic morning cough and a damaged central nervous system. I remember being upset because I had to cancel a flight to visit family for Christmas, having no clue what was in store in 2020. I was scheduled for a hysterectomy the following month, three months from my previous abdominal surgery, 6 months after my initial diagnostic laparoscopy for endometriosis. Life felt unbearably uncertain.

I have spent so much of the past two years struggling within a relatively stable life. After a lifetime of instability, it seems impossible to me to wake up in my own bed, in a house that I rent and feel at home in, to have a job that is purposeful, flexible, and accommodating of my illnesses, to have a wonderful community full of rich and depthful relationships- in short, to feel harmony between my body and the world around me.

More than my stabilized circumstances, I feel that my capacity has expanded after feeling like I have been treading water for years. I’m still processing a significant mental health experience I had this fall, still processing the ways that hurricane Helene has affected my community, yet now, in this season in which I typically struggle and fumble with seasonal depression (on top of the clinical depression that has been my baseline for most of my life), I feel remarkably okay, and bewildered to be so. I’m grateful for this energy that has returned to me, grateful I can turn it outward to my community and into creativity.

I first became obsessed with spirals after reading The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, in which the endless spiral is a repeated motif. The Witcher has been a constant throughout this part of my life, having first become absorbed by the universe of the Witcher (I’ve played Witcher II and III and have salivated over IV’s cinematic trailer more times than I can count, as well as read the entire series several times and watched the Netflix show) while recovering from the aforementioned hysterectomy.

The spiral motif came to me again and again, from when I moved back to my hometown and into my grandmother’s house in 2021, to when I began researching the genetic condition I was diagnosed in, to the various cyclical experiences I kept having throughout the past 5 years. I finally made an illustration of an ouroboros to connect deeper to the idea of the spiral earlier this year as a meditation on the cycles of my life.

I first read Claire M. Anderson’s Seasons of the Slavic Soul sometime in the earlier days of the pandemic, possibly 2021 or 2022. My family is mostly Polish and Czech, though as a 4th generation American, I’ve only received bits and pieces of the culture of my ancestors. I’ve read a lot over the past few years, but I think this year is the first year that any of the books I’ve read on seasonal living have integrated with my body.

This year, I also finished Upheaval, the project I’ve been working on for four years. Upheaval is intimately tied to my life over the past 5 years, and informed by my deepening social research, particularly around disability justice and environmental justice issues. From chronic health issues, to transitioning gender identities, to my relationship to rural spaces, to finding safety in a body that largely feels unsafe, to my relationship to medicine, this project spirals through memories and relationships, forging new connections.

Making this work was a process that required me to grow and change. Friends might recall me complaining for most of the year that I couldn’t figure out how to finish the work, and the reality was that I wasn’t finished living the story yet. This project isn’t a linear narrative of healing, but rather a progression along a spiral, returning again and again to wounds and joys as they manifest visually in my life.

I shy away from reframing trauma in a positive way, as there is a forced positivity that permeates our culture that I believe comes from an inability to sit with uncomfortable things. I’m not grateful for the hard experiences I’ve had in my life, but I do honor the many ways that living a complicated life alongside immense support from others has given me a more intersectional perspective and deep, living knowledge of how to exist as a complicated body.

This year, when I’ve felt the grip of the terror I’ve carried within me loosen, I have found myself amazed at the ease I am slowly finding in my life. The ability to take a deep breath feels so much more expansive now, my nervous system slowly unwinding and learning to rest again. I am not “fixed” or “cured,” my body’s connective tissue is structurally different, my organs will not grow back, I still get overwhelmed by the lights and music in the supermarket and experience intractable pain in my joints. Yet, the subtle shift, the ability to actually rest, has been an immense gift this year.

I am incredibly excited for the year ahead.