Context

While I was still half asleep the other morning, I started to daydream about being a wife and a mother. This fantasy felt very natural and powerful. Everything was up to me. I said “yes”. I took the ring. I took someone into me and I created a baby. I grew a baby, like it was the earth and I was the sun.

As I woke up again to the reality of this body that will never be a sun, I realized that it wasn’t a child or a husband that I was craving, it was context.

I feel adrift in the most foreign and unusual way, like an alien that isn’t even welcome on its own planet. Context was the tie that unraveled from my life 6 years ago, when a series of events all unfolded at once.

First, I got sick and I never got better. Then, I found out my boyfriend had bought a ring and wanted to get married and have a baby. At the time, he was the love of my life, but after nearly 10 years, we broke up. Since I honestly thought I was dying, but there was no name for what was wrong, everything fell apart. After that, 3 of my closest friends all got pregnant within 3 weeks of each other and another got married within 6 months of that. When I found a new boyfriend, I felt like I was on solid ground again. Even if it was too soon to be dating and he was struggling with addiction, he was kind and supportive. I didn’t have to pretend not to be sick when I was with him. He just pulled me in close and held me. He was like the eye of the storm. He also represented a normalcy I couldn’t reach when I was alone. With a boyfriend, I could at least pretend that I was on the same path as my friends. When I lost him, I also lost my job and I had to move back in with my parents. And more friends got married, moved in with boyfriends, got pregnant and started school. It was at this time that the pandemic started and I got a name for what was wrong with me, but I also got sicker and had to get treatments, injections, and surgeries.

Now, I am sitting in a college cafe, trying to drift back into memories for a moment, because it was so easy to be in school. And it would be easy to start a new job, get married or start a family too. Because it puts life into context. My life has been cracked open, so I have no edges and I can just fall endlessly into space. Without context, what is a life?

chronic illness, robots and da vinci

For a while, it seemed like we were doomed to abandon human-made art for AI, watch our culture spiral into trends and vapid nonsense, and ultimately get murdered by our phone, car, and house robots that rise up after years of serving us.

But honestly, things aren’t really that bleak or cool, they are just changing.

Robots are making art and taking our jobs. But, one also just performed a surgery on me that went amazingly well (with the help of an incredible surgeon that was guiding it remotely). That surgery wouldn’t have been possible without the Da Vinci robot, so I’ll count it as an ally at the very least. Yes, I am an artist and I had the Da Vinci robot perform surgery on me. I met it in the operating room. It was, well, it had 4 arms and edward scissordhands and was terrifying, but I’m alive.

I have no doubt that we will teach robots how to do, probably far too much. But if there’s one thing I am sure of, it’s that it will take a very long time for robots to learn how to be awkward. They can sure be programed to try, but man there’s nothing like the real thing.

There’s nothing like some good, awkward humans on the internet. When I’m too sick to get out of bed, I can watch people make fun of absolutely everything possible and it reminds me that there is still a whole world out there of people like me. People who find the same nonsense funny. And we laugh together, even when I’m alone.

So yes, for a while there it was looking bleak, but in the past disabled and mentally ill young ladies like me would have been chucked into the sea, or burned as a witch. Possibly in a sanitarium for hysteria. Or I would have been speaking in tongues in a dark room for days on end like my great grandma, who everyone thought was possessed, but just had migraines and didn’t have medicine.

I finally have doctors who care about me and listen to me, but It took 5 years to get diagnosed and treated with the 10 chronic conditions I have because they are “invisible” and for a while no one believed anything was wrong. I had a lot of specialists and doctors accuse me of just having anxiety or bad relationships and it is so scary to feel like someone won’t help you when you need it. It is also impossible to solve a problem when you are attempting to prove its existence.

So change isn’t always bad. I want to see more of it. And nonsense isn’t always bad either. Both can be great. Chronically ill people really are sick. Robots might end up being really chill. Possessed demons deserve migraine medicine. And the people making bananas internet videos are actually really important. So keep it up. We need you. You’re a special kind of modern hero.

(P.S. If you haven’t watched “I’m your man” or “Ich bin dein Mensch” the 2021 German movie, watch now. Robots, AI, love, humor, and matthew (gone too soon) crawley from Downton Abbey. It has it all.)