 Hey, I'm Kristen. I'm going to read two fragmented, short-ish pieces. I got a concussion last fall, so I've been trying to get more into writing. It's been very fragmented, so I'm just going to go with the flow, and cool. So we went to Chicago's ZuneFest and our friend, Carolina Hicks, who runs subtle ceiling, if you heard of. Great work, makes mini-comic, or mini-zines slash mini-comics, and ran a workshop. So I made my own mini-zine, and it's called Small. I went to the lake to touch the waves. Touching the lake made me feel small. It's a small I can choose to feel. I feel the smallest when I feel like I don't belong to my body. When my body gets sick, I feel connected to a vast world. I can't comprehend a world that sickens me. I feel small getting the letter telling me I had to take Medi-Cal to court. Another lake to swim through. I feel small, but I'm trying to be mighty. I want to be sick, but mighty. I want to be able to choose when I'm small. I am my sickness, but my sickness is not all that I am. I want to stop drowning. So that's the mini-zine I made. And so this next one is a bunch of fragments of writing. I've been thinking a lot about illness and bacteria in the body. And I wrote a multi-species ethnography. It was an academic work, so I'm trying to forge the connection between personal and academic. So it's fragmented on purpose. I will never exist medically as the way I see myself. I am only legible when I force myself into boxes I cannot fit into. Pieces of me are seen, but those that push or fall out of the boxes do not exist. I only exist within the confines of these boxes, constantly packaging myself up to be seen. I'm sending a package in the mail that the post office isn't going to accept. The package is almost always returned. I am pieces of a person in every doctor's office. I'm an unset package until I separate myself and pack myself up into smaller and smaller boxes, breaking myself into multiple persons. Being sick means I have to constantly package myself up for the medical consumption that is a doctor's visit. I'm always presenting in ways that scream, take me seriously, this pain is real. I have to study before every visit, afraid I don't know the answers necessary to talk to a doctor, to bring myself to the next step in the process. I am jumping constantly, hoping to make it into the hoops they've created. I am jumping on one foot in the neurologist's office when she tells me I'm fine. Her tests all point to nothing. She says I have a disorder, but I have to go back to the ENT, that's where I belong. The fatigue and stomach problems hit shortly after. There's too many bacteria in my gut, I hear them screaming at me. I cannot deny the effects the microbiota have on me. The fatigue they bring daily affects my ability to exist, to write, the way I visualize and communicate these thoughts. Without them, I would not be myself. We are one, but we are also many. The doctors say too many. How do I separate my body from the microbiota in it when they are here 24-7? What do we consist of? How am I supposed to departmentalize this body and the beings that make it up? Maybe departmentalizing is the wrong move. Maybe I should be looking at my body as one small ecosystem of mutual cultivation and entanglements. I think of the porosity of bodies, how some believe they'll catch pains from the bottom of my gut. How my pain becomes there, yeah, sometimes I get a stomach ache, but only if I eat cheese. There, oh yeah, my ears ring, but only if I go to a loud concert. My pain is fluttering through the pores of my skin to bring destruction to their lives as well. I am but diseased molecules slipping through the gaps, slipping through their gaps, a non-linear, illegible being within the realm of the healthy. I think how much I want to be diagnosed have yet to be clearly diagnosed to be believed. That's me, okay. Hey, I'm Mara. I do a lot of personal zines and this is one that I finish maybe like two months ago but actually forgot what I had written until when I was reformatting it last night. And it's called this goddamn body number two. I want so badly for things to just be okay with regards to my body. I need it to know that it's basically 26 years old, not however old it thinks it is by playing all these games. When I was 14, I got hit by a car, had surgery on my shoulder when I was 19. My shoulder's still messed up and the pain has been recently exacerbated by work. I just got home from physical therapy. It hasn't hurt this badly since about six months after the surgery when I tried to go back into martial arts and my body was like, no. I am bringing this up because I've tattooed over the scars from my surgery but I'm still feeling it six years later. What the fuck, body? Behave yourself. My brain is one in charge here although that may not be the best decision. I need my body and brain to hang out for a little bit, get reacquainted, make some informed decisions together on what's best for me. I want bad things to stop happening to the communities that I identify with. I am referring specifically to Stanford and Orlando. I want men to stop raping people. I want queer people to stop being killed. My body often feels like it doesn't belong to me. I am trying to think of things that I actually like to do with slash about slash regarding my body. I like kissing. I like to hold the people I love. I like being held by the people I love. I like to put on makeup. I like to shave my head. I like to feel the wind in my leg hair. I like getting tattoos. I think of things that I do because I don't like my body. I pick at my fingers. And then I pick some more. I bleed, I repeat. That's why it helps. It's not good for me though. I stopped for a while. I took a little pill that would help it stop. Didn't work. I used to think that no one would ever want to hold my hand because they were so bloody and ugly. Massacred. Of course I was wrong. One person in the entire world has ever wanted to hold my hand. When Sarah or Ben see me do it, they try to get eye contact and give me this look like please stop, I care about you and don't want you to hurt yourself. And it helps temporarily, but sometimes it doesn't. And I put my hands under the table and keep doing it. In an effort to attempt to remain positive about my body, I'll tell you why I like getting tattooed. I like the feeling of the needle scraping. I know it's really going in and out of my skin along my limbs. It feels like when I burn myself in the shower or get scratched. I like that I get to put things on my body to make it feel more like a home and less like a crappy apartment that I won't be in for long. I'm talking established, cutely furnished, new pots and pans, home. And sometimes I prefer to just do it myself because the need is that urgent and I just really need to feel in control of my body. I cannot watch something without thinking of my own body. I am hyper aware. I can never forget that I am all these limbs attached to a big stump, but I'm really a twig and I bend and snap in too. My body is not as strong as I would like it to be, but I do nothing to fix this. I sit and I rot. I should be doing my PT exercises right now and I can't believe that I let my shoulder get this bad. Why do I punish myself? I know it's not a race, but damn if I don't feel upset when I see people learn to accept their bodies and mental illnesses for what they are and not try to change them drastically to fit a certain ideal. For me, however, I will always be capital C crazy. I was talking to a friend a while ago who doesn't really get mental illness and he proposed the idea that maybe someday I won't need my daily meds. I laughed in his face. I'll be on them every day until I'm dead. I take these to stop myself from dying sooner rather than later. I take these to protect the people around me from me. I take these to protect me from myself.