By Erin Williams
When I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, there were two emotions. Elation: I finally had a word for the myriad symptoms that had changed everything about my days. And heartbreak: Absent a cure, I’d be living with this condition for the rest of my life. Months rolled forward, and so did stages of grief. I knew there was no going back to normal, but still, at times, I’d try to remember it - the way I felt when I wasn’t draped in pain - just a body floating through space, like the way days feel when the temperature is just right and neither hot nor cold are present, and a breeze carries the air. I tried to hold onto it, the memory of inhabiting featherlightness. But it’s been a while now, and excavating old bones has gotten harder. So instead, I step outside, where I expand to carry light and earth and song, a body joined by a million wonders: crickets and their wing music, clouds and their sky paintings, trees and their collective care. I move forward, one foot of stardust at a time. “You matter less,” society says to chronically ill and disabled folks. “I am matter,” I respond.
Erin Williams (she/her) freelances in media and communications, storytelling training, and dialogue facilitation. As a Story Gatherer with Out of Eden Walk, she’s also collecting stories of “home” to add to this crowd-sourced, global HomeStories map (if you’re interested in contributing, please message her). Erin is grateful for the friends she’s made through Suffering the Silence, Zeno Mountain Farm, and the Spoonie Collective. She’s also grateful to be living near a beautiful field that’s home to dozens of songbirds, sandhill cranes, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, painted and snapping turtles, white-tailed deer, coyotes, and lots of rodents, amphibians, and insects, whose names she’s learning, too. She hopes the field will be there for a long, long time.