Disability Art
What happens when you know something is wrong with your body and everything you do to make it better doesn’t work?
What happens when the doctors finally figure it out?
How do you process a new reality? One where your body no longer works the same way and never will.
Art is one on they ways I started to process my feelings around being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a neurodegenerative auto-immune disease.
The pieces below are a reflection of that processing.
The last (?) in a series of collage paintings that encapsulated how I was feeling about my body with my new diagnosis. The cut up and collaged maps represent the interruptions in my neural pathways that cause my fingers to tingle and become numb. The thumb that doesn’t have much feeling in black and the dna strands in the fingers showing the the biological nature of the disease. The imperfections in the color where my brightness became a little less so.
Multiple Sclerosis is an auto-immune disease where the brain and spine develop lesions around the myelin sheath interrupting signals to parts of the body. It can manifest in a number of different ways for different people.
Broken.
For many people with a chronic illness, they have limited energy. People don’t understand how this works, so we use spoon theory to help people understand how our energy is limited. Basically, you have a set number of spoons to use in a day—these represent your energy. When you do something, it uses up a spoon. And when you’re out of spoons, you are spent.
Broken Spoons.
Mixed Signals
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![Collage of mixed up maps in the form of a brain and back]()
Hidden Scars
The first in the collage series exploring how lesions disrupt the neurological signal. Appearing in the brain and the spinal cord, they can impact the whole body.
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![Image of a leg with mismatched maps and a dropped foot]()
Interrupted Signals
My disease showed up in my foot and leg. It started with some numbness, and then it impacted my gait, limiting how far I can walk, and led to foot drop. It was the lesions in my spine that led to these interrupted signals.
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![Image of Foot with Some Toes Blacked Out]()
Losing Feeling
I was sitting at a pool one day and my big toe went numb. It wasn’t until I saw a doctor who testing my ability to feel vibrations on my feet that I realized I couldn’t feel it.
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![Pottery Bust with a lesion on the brain and swirled thoughts radiating out.]()
Head Lesions
Some people with MS have cognitive fog. This seems like an easy to miss diagnosising symptom for people because their symptoms are dismissed. But, it’s very real. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
