I am finally on the proper medications, 19 years after I first started getting sick. I can breathe properly. I can eat without my throat swelling up, or my blood pressure plummeting. I can exercise and my heart rate stays in a normal range. And yet I cannot say how angry I am.
I cannot say how angry I am to have been told to just wait for things to get better. Or to have been scolded for pointing out frank diagnostic errors. To have been told that sometimes you must just accept that "life just sucks."
I cannot believe how much my precious time was wasted by not being taken seriously. I am still trying to piece it all together, but...fuck, you know? That I was stubborn enough to not let doctors just abandon me to their own lack of curiosity and care.
The way that I have been framed as an angry woman, an angry Black woman, who has to be so polite in medical spaces and not cry or be "hostile." The way that having to tolerate the intolerance of others feels like being told to just tolerate pain and discomfort in my own body.
I take simple medications. I take over-the-counter histamine blockers and I take a prescription mast cell stabilizer and I can breathe, I can eat, I can exercise. I can sleep better. My stomach is settling after 19 years. And my rage is barely containable.
I know that I have to be careful about my health for the rest of my life, and I'm still trying to figure out how to manage day-to-day. I am not "cured" and I still live with disability and chronic illness, but it's...I don't know. I feel hopeful, despite being angry as hell.

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More from @empathywarrior

11 Feb
Whenever I see postdoc ads, I still click on them. And then I see that they have a 5-year limit on PhD freshness and I both laugh and cry. Especially when these are for Black and/or Indigenous scholars! And in this pandemic time? *sucks teeth*
There is a real sharpness to this violence of time and expired use value, not just of the ideas but of the bodies and the communities in which those ideas circulate, live, ferment. I am thinking about how this lives along the ideas of “Black excellence” in universities.
As a trauma theorist and memory studies scholar I just would please like a shirt that says my graduation year on it and then the word “BELATED” in all-caps and a loud font, but my point is, time isn’t neutral and I am not surprised how institutional time is further hardening
Read 4 tweets
8 Feb
It's great to be asked if you have extended health insurance before a medication or treatment is prescribed but also like devastating to be like "yes I have been un/der-employed for months and am trying to find work after leaving academia, no I don't have extended health"
I'm already on medication that I'm taking a lower dose of mostly so that I don't have to spend 100$ a week on it (it also seems that the lower dose is fine for now) but TROLOLOL what is life
"And hopefully next time we check in you will have full-time employment with benefits!" well actually that optimism about the job market is charming, I'm just considering going back to school so that I can have student extended health benefits, but okay
Read 7 tweets

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