Sick Business
I have left every job I’ve ever had for health reasons.
Due to being chronically ignored or misunderstood by both doctors and my caretakers as a young person, I came to mistrust the value of telling anyone that my body and mind were suffering, so I quit my jobs and relied on welfare and credit cards to restore myself until the next job came around. Going to the doctor to say that I have to leave a job felt like a sure way to get laughed at (yes, I’ve been laughed at by doctors), and to be pressured to hurt myself in the name of making money again (I have never had a doctor NOT pressure me to go back to work as a priority, ever). Of course now I know that if I had been going to the doctor and receiving sick notes to explain my departures, then I would have an incredibly compelling paper trail to demonstrate how I have lived for the past 20 years. Since I didn’t get those notes validating my choices to protect my health, I now have to rely on self-reporting only, and doctors dismiss that more readily than anything else I might have to say. It’s extraordinary, the hubris of client care.
It was only once I secured stable, supportive, long term housing for myself that I was able to recognize: I need to earn money completely on my own terms if I want to avoid making my chaotic health situation worse. I chose me, and I worked my ass off for it.
Despite doing something I absolutely LOVED, teaching students comics and health practices online every week for over a year, keeping my schedule loose and flexible for my health peaks and valleys, offering transparency to my students so that I had room to be a human as I went…I still burned out. New health symptoms cropped up and took me from highly capable to bedridden, for weeks at a time, and ultimately I had to stop. I had to let the business rest. I had to leave my students without the space they’d come to with such commitment and brilliance, many of them right from the beginning. I had to break my own heart, and put down everything I’d built, on faith that it was going to be okay. I had to stop the activities that were making me money to live on.
I knew, and still know, the value of what I did with my self-oriented, health-inclusive business model, even though it never made enough for me to create sustainability so I could dig myself out of the catastrophic debt that chronic illness facilitated me into. My illness fed my debt and my debt fed the machine of the economy and nobody fed me. I’m starving now, not in my stomach but in my worth. Wasn’t my work, my dedication, the books I’ve made and the community I’ve fostered, exactly what we’re told is most valuable? Didn’t I do everything right, and isn’t that supposed to lead to financial returns?
Working hard does not guarantee payment. People valuing my work – and I know they do, because they tell me how much I’ve changed their lives! – does not equate to riches, or even a livable wage. Fuck wages. I don’t want my hours to be counted and tallied. I just need enough money to keep my body safe, warm, fed, watered, and clean. If I had more than enough for that, I’d be sharing it to make sure others had the same.
People, primarily health care practitioners of all sorts, keep emphasizing that my number one health goal is to get back to work. Every single time I hear this, I want to say, “I am working right now. I am writing, I’m making comics, I’m undoing the horrific tangle of trauma and colonial capitalist sexist racist socialization that has been harming me and others for centuries, I’m learning all the time, feeling and listening and resting and it’s work. I don’t need more work, I need to get paid for the work I’m already doing.”
Capitalism will literally be the death of us, if we don’t stop it. And we die many times, in different ways than the classic halting of bodily processes. Our will dies, and with it so much of our capacity to heal. Our imagination dies, and with it so much of our capacity to love. Our heart dies, and with it so much of our feeling that we lose our sense of self in small and big ways as part of “normal” life. What life? What normal?
Creativity is the antidote, the rebellion song, the trauma cure.
Health itself has a new definition for me: it’s the ability to respond. There is not state of health that is perfect and pure for every person to achieve. There is only the dynamic, fluctuating, and creative response within you to whatever today may bring.
When you’re body can’t respond, it needs help. When your body’s response is short term, it may cause more trouble in the long term, so it needs a more long term shift to find a creative new way of being. Your body is more a process than an object. Creativity is a process, not an object. To me, they are the same.
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My business is primarily my art, which is to say I am an artist and I want that to support my resources. I have two published books and two more on the way, and my website is a resource both to support my books and to deepen folks’ engagement with my creations by offering more value, more resources, more support, and more learning experiences than the books alone. My website is also a different access point, for those who need other means to engage with my ideas and artwork, such as articles with links, videos, audio, PDF downloads, and images. It’s a work in progress, always.
When I have experiences, I want to share them. When I learn something new, I want to tell people. When I suffer, fall down, hurt myself, I need support to move through those things without shame – and sharing is the shame-shifter. Because communication is so regulating for my nervous system, all of this sharing is an act of self support, and self love. If it could benefit someone else, then all the better.
I want my website to be a place that people visit because it is so useful and helpful and inspiring to them. I want them to find things on my website that they didn’t expect to be there, but that enhance their understanding of my work and its value, and give insights and support to their lives. I love that we share the process of living, and the nuances of each person’s unique experiences within that universal project.
Above all concerns is my authenticity and integrity. What I commit myself to, the work that I do, it has to feel like me, read like me, and represent my values as they grow and change and evolve -- and in doing so, my messiness and inconsistency will also be present. It is one of my values that being human is okay. The reason I need my activities to align with my whole self is not idealistic, it’s practical: when I am out of alignment with my values, my body shuts down. I get physical pain from the tension of doing things I don’t agree with, or feel conflicted about. I’m not performing this level of integrity with myself for anybody, I’m doing it for me, so I can live with less pain.
Being sick is expensive. There’s just no way to access specific dietary needs, mobility aids, manual treatments, the expertise and tests and the ever-expanding field of medical research, without money. Canada has a universal healthcare plan, and many strict gatekeepers. All my needs fall outside of their awareness, despite being thoroughly studied and documented by science, so the government does not support me financially to pursue my own health. I pay on credit cards, and then lines of credit, and then a mortgage, and then student debt because being at school offers some relief and financial lenience…and now? I don’t know exactly where to go. It seems the only way is down, into more and more debt, until I lose everything.
My practices of self regard and self love and revolution dreaming say “no” to this ableist capitalist trap. Yes, I still have enormous terrifying debt that I have to deal with every month. No, I will not be paralyzed by it. I will not shrink in shame and collapse my will. I will not adopt manipulative and exploitative business practices that take me further from myself simply to make as much money as possible, the world be damned. I am here to do better, in hell.
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The logistics of this are rarified. I have everything to lose, but I was already losing while doing all the “right” things, so why don’t I try doing everything wrong?
I’ve decided to put all my work online for free. I don’t want to concern myself with metrics of engagement, sales funnels, or manufacturing scarcity, coercing commitment (“you have to have skin in the game”), or any sunken cost feelings you might have if you paid for my work up front.
My new business model is this: you can have it all, because sharing my work has already benefitted me so deeply. If it speaks or sings to you, then you can choose to thank me in whatever way works best for you – and you are the only person who knows best. At the end of every blog post, whether it’s a page of my comics, or a bunch of philosophical and angry writing, or a link to resources I enjoy for learning, or a book club recommendation, there will be a button for you to drop some cash in my account. There will also be an invitation for you to send that post along to someone you think might enjoy it – sharing is caring, after all.
When it comes to physical objects, there will always be an up front charge because I have to pay up front for the objects to be made, and to ship them to you. If Squarespace, my chosen website platform, had better sales options, I would let you decide what to pay on top of the base material fees, so that you could honour your own ability to pay. For now, I don’t have that option on the site, so I offer that you can email me asking for a discount, and I will always say yes.
I’d really like people to be able to buy my books directly from me, with my signature in them. I’d like to be able to write specific little notes to everyone who buys a book from me, to engage with them for real. In order to sell my books myself, I would have to buy them wholesale from my publisher (I pay 50% of the cover price) and have them shipped from the opposite coast and through international customs, both of which cost more money. From those costs alone, I would have to charge more than the cover price of the book, AND because I like on the North Atlantic island of Newfoundland, I would have to add exorbitant Canada Post shipping costs to send the purchased books to their new homes. It would also be a trip to the post office for me, adding gasoline to the cost of it all, and buying shipping supplies, and all of this would be something I could do only when I’m not in a pain flair, so my deliveries would be randomly delayed according the schedule of my body.
That’s what sick business has to be: able to respond. Inconsistent. Sometimes the appropriate response to a signal from the body is to stop, to pause, to delay. Sometimes it’s important to say no. Sometimes there needs to be a bit of negotiation between me and my clients about how to meet both of our needs.
I offer all this writing as a practice to myself – you might be surprised to learn the major habitual defenses that kicked up as I wrote some of these lines, and the care I had to bring to those parts of me – and I also offer this as my explanation to you, in case you are interested in my work.
This blog is something of a grab bag: there’s a collection of things you are likely to find here, and I aim to post them regularly, but I make no promises! The surprise is part of the fun. The surprise of following my own wild whims is what keeps me healthy, and my ADHD brain happy.
Here’s to the start of a more self-accepting, creatively-stimulating, values-demonstrating chapter in the book of my life. This is Sick Business, and I am a Sick Woman, making something for herself.