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I wrote Auto-Immune Heresy out of a need to speak. To give voice to an experience that has been mine, and is infinitely larger than me.I am speaking about sickness. Long-lived, recurrent, and entangled with the entire 21st century into which I was born.
I believe it is a challenging book. It was difficult to write, and I regard it still as an imperfect offering. But it is what I have to give in this moment.
Auto-Immune Heresy collects 8 years of writing about 20 years of chronic illness. It recounts a mythopoetic account of chronic sickness and perpetual healing, bridging personal narrative, poetry, and essay. The project is first a memoir steeped in a 20 year personal history with the diagnosis of chronic immune thrombocytopenia, an uncommon autoimmune condition. Second, it weaves critiques of health/healthcare with notions of disability justice, in tandem with my personal reflections on living with blindness and being trans. These personal storylines are told against a backdrop of coming to terms with non-binarism, living a sacred life, and accepting the collapse of cultural narrative amidst the widespread denial of climate change, with the associated grief.
This book project is a means of re-narrativizing my life. It follows my thinking and feeling through the complexities of embodiment. This project is one of inscribing questions rather than alleging answers. Making a hypersigil of healing from the false and harmful notions that shaped my body's systems. The story is foremost one of healing. Healing as a practice and process that is ongoing without end. The principal actors in the narrative are my body, the patient (an abstraction of me), maman, the doctors, and the bloodstream extending beyond humanity. My wish is that the story helps others feel seen. You and I are not alone.
The cover art work is by the amazing Meagan Chaput.
