February 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 1

“Illness is the only form in which "life" in capitalism is possible….Relations of production in capitalism involve that living work has to be turned into dead matter [commodified]. Illness expresses this process, which is in permanent progress and gaining ground.” -  Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, 1987

I was that mentally ill, trans, neurodivergent, confused kid in my perfect suburban family.

After two humiliating forced institutionalizations as a young teen, I internalized that (1) I must be self-sufficient/abled/competent to be free from the horrors of institutionalization (2) if I am abled/competent/normal I will finally have friends.

A lot of autistic kids, especially the masc or white (white-passing, white-adjacent) ones that get seen as smart, channel our social shame into a giant ego about our technical abilities (see for example “Elon Musk’s Autistic Anti-Patterns” by Fergus Murray). With that background already built during childhood, I dedicated my post-institutionalization teenage years to a hardcore all-in project of being 100% abled. That meant cis female, self-sufficient, neurotypical, athletic, stable, and accomplished.

I was pretty good at it. If you know me now, you wouldn’t believe it. But I had the privilege to back me up and being busy all the time kept my existential dread to a murmur. I gave up my brother's hammydown sweats for skinny jeans, dated a man, joined a sports team, and made friends with the coolest kids in my alternative school for fucked up youth. Since I needed nothing, I fulfilled my need for emotional intimacy by tending to others' mental illnesses.

Unfortunately this couldn’t last because I am actually trans and autistic and pretty nuts and eventually me and my boyfriend and my friends all found out and they weren't happy about it. But the core of my abled identity didn’t falter.

Almost a decade later, find me in my life as a radical farmer, openly trans and openly weird, and still fixated on my strength, competence, self-sufficiency, accomplishments and resilience as a main source of self-esteem and role in community. As someone who hadn’t felt valued for my awkward presence, I had learned to focus on the work I could offer as a way to feel valued in relationships.

Strangely enough, this was quite normal in my anticapitalist social circles. It was normal to glorify people who work “tirelessly,” to work yourself until burnout and expect the burnout will end in a couple months, to have all your relationships tied up in your work, to try to create our dreams with 1% of the needed resources (because what other option do we have?), and to leave behind all the people who can’t keep up with this pace because the work is too important to pause.

I don’t know the better way. I do know that we were neglecting care - the most anticapitalist work. I do know I felt guilty for wanting my partner at the time to take my illness as seriously as they took their organizing.

While I was deep in this culture, I got a concussion and probably a foot injury. With much angst I cancelled a work trip and slowed down my life for a few weeks. I forced myself to rest, knowing that I needed to rest to get back to work faster. About two months later with my headaches and foot pain almost gone I was hosting a week-long encuentro in NYC, and then came straight back into an extremely chaotic month-long infrastructure build at the farm where I worked and lived.

Somewhere between NYC and the build my headaches and foot pain mysteriously returned and wouldn’t go away. I could not use a screen, I could not paint/draw, I could not drive, I could not walk, I could not listen to music, I could not bike, I could not read, I could not get hot, I could not eat chewy or spicy or cold food, I could not go to an event or dinner party or hangout or meeting.

For a while I was in a cycle of occasionally tapping my head against something, this triggering about two weeks of intense headaches, which was about how long it would take for me to accidentally tap my head again. My neighbor generously gave me an American eagle themed hard hat, and I focused on not hitting my head as the main solution.

Emotionally I was in crisis. What happens when everything that you’re fighting to hold together falls apart? And then life just keeps going?

I didn’t know who I was (how do you reconstruct an identity when you’ve lost the physical ability to be yourself?). I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know how to wrap my head around a problem that had no solution. I hated myself for being sick. I was panicked by the idea of an uncertain future with a mysterious illness spent lying on the floor meditating through pain (how do you envision a future when you have no idea what your body will be tomorrow, let alone a year from now?). I blamed myself for making the wrong decisions, and the people around me blamed me too. Angry and ashamed by how abandoned I felt, I struggled to ask for the care that I wish my loved ones had given me without me asking. I became terribly aware that almost all my relationships, my connection to place, my role in community - they had all been wrapped up in work. The ableism in the supposedly liberatory spaces I worked in was suddenly crystal clear as I was the one being left behind. I clung onto the work I could still do as a distraction, a way to feel connected to the world, a way to believe I still meant something.

Over a couple months in this state of panic my body spiraled. I felt weak and had no appetite. I mysteriously lost weight. I would spend the nighttime hours listening to my heartbeat and unable to sleep, feeling the sensation of my body deteriorating as I watched the sun rise.

I remember this phase ending on my birthday, which I usually like to spend hiking and watching my favorite stoner nature documentary. Depressed because I could not do these things and because my partner had left on a work trip and forgot my birthday, I tried my best to pretend I didn’t care. But the two people staying at the farm made me dinner anyway and then my neighbor surprised me with cake and a beautiful song. Listening to the song I had a flash of remembering how it felt to be cared for, a tiny slit into my vault of suppressed desires, and it felt so amazing that all my beliefs around not needing support crumbled.

Ok, it definitely wasn’t that simple in real life, but looking back that day was a turning point for me. I started at least trying to take care of myself, got health insurance, started going to acupuncture and cranial sacral, started resting, and my body began to come back to life. Eventually I started a program for “limbic system impairment,” which is based on the premise that your body has gotten stuck in an embodied crisis response of fight, flight or freeze (fight, in my case). The program offers a clear regimen of essentially manifestation and exposure therapy to bring your body back into a healthy state. (Hit me up if you want to know about this program - I’ve seen it be life changing for many people with mysterious chronic illnesses but it has its problems).

This program did not solve all my problems, and it doesn’t for many people who have ongoing external stress. But the combination of this program and letting go of most parts of my life did get rid of my headaches.

To get out of my sick embodied-fight-mode I had to leave my work (which was a mess anyway) and eventually my partnership (also a mess anyway), take a lot of time off, and reexamine my entire life approach. I rested and accepted the isolation of it because there was no other choice. I admitted how badly I craved care even when it wasn’t available. I became ten times more emotionally vulnerable in all my relationships. And I accepted the disabled identity that I had spent so long running away from. Thanks to amazing virtual disabled community, I realized that I could let myself be disabled and I would still be alive and maybe even happy.

This isn’t an “I’m cured” story. My foot pain didn’t go away, actually it spread to other joints. As my headaches were fading I got lyme because climate change exploded the tick population, and as I write this Los Alamos is venting nuclear mist into the air outside my house. As disability justice teaches us, illness is a fact of life and an even bigger fact of capitalism, and most of the time you can’t think your way out of it.

But. As I have given up my fight against disability, my body has been coming out of embodied-fight-mode and my most debilitating pain has disappeared. This pain was perpetuated by hating myself for being sick, by the belief that disability = death. 

Embodied-fight-mode is a crisis response state and my terror towards a disabled future was a huge part of that perceived crisis. If I hadn’t been panicked by my state of sickness and we didn’t live in a world where being sick meant marginalization, the sickness probably wouldn’t have become chronic in the first place.

How much chronic illness is caused by ableism, including internalized ableism? By the fear of illness? By isolation or the fear of it? By needing to or choosing to push through?