From DMS to … DMS

The more time passes, and the more consistently secure I feel in where things have settled with my health and my daily rhythms, the more aware I’ve become of how different my life is now as compared to how it was when I published my first De Morbo Sacro post eons ago. Back then, epilepsy and academia were such time-sucking, controlling forces that “sucked of time” and “controlled” could’ve succinctly described my entire existence with relative accuracy (throw “LEGO enthusiast” and “weirdo” in there, and you’d have yourself a photorealist portrait of this blogger as a younger woman). In ways good and bad but mostly good, which seems paradoxical given pretty much everything that’s happened in the meantime, I’m no longer the newly diagnosed person I used to be but am rather Me 2.0: wheelchair-using, prematurely retired, significantly happier and less confused edition.

As a result of these changes, I sometimes struggle to decide how much to share and what to write in my De Morbo Sacro missives. How far can I stray from my original mission? How much do I want to veer away from the goals that inspired me in those early years? On the one hand, I’m not sure it makes sense to focus on disability stuff as much as I once did. On the other hand, disability is still something I live with, and I refuse to let you forget it. On yet another, for apparently I’m a three-handed individual, there’s other stuff—primarily sewing—I’d love to chronicle in a more targeted and obnoxiously detailed way because it currently occupies more of my headspace than waiting for my next seizure does, and thank goodness for that.

I’ve thus been considering starting a second blog or Instagram account or whatever platform you’re supposed to use these days if you have a vanity project you wish to impose on the denizens of the World Wide Web. However, that seems like a lot of work, and while I intend to invest the necessary energy in a month or two, I’m too busy/lazy to expand my social media empire right now. I’m also impatient, though, which is why I decided this very day (yay!) to let myself pivot a little in the meantime. I’m able to justify this to myself for many reasons, among which is the fact that sewing has played a key role in my ongoing neurological rehabilitation and overall mental-health management, even if I sometimes wonder if my passion for sewing could be considered a disorder in itself. So De Morbo Sacro to … De Morbo Sewing? (Nope: just the classic DMS for the time being, but fewer hospitalization recaps and more project summaries.)

To be clear, this isn’t a total rejection of the epilepsy and disability angle. Not all posts will be purely sewing-related, but more of them will be. I’ll undoubtedly keep documenting and (over)analyzing and complaining about the health and accessibility piece of things since it’s important and relevant and part of my life and always will be. Some posts will be about sewing with a disability and the adaptations that whole venture requires; accessibility needs, after all, affect almost everything, hobbies included. (What a shocker.) In any case, I figure that I might as well stop resisting the direction I feel myself organically moving and instead stride/roll confidently ahead, firm in my resolve to win an Oscar for costume design (because why dream small?!?) or, more satisfyingly and realistically, content to sit in front of my sewing machine ripping seam after seam as I ponder life’s weird and wonderful twists and turns and marvel at my ability to focus on honing a skill requiring fine-motor skills—something I’d never have dreamed would be possible a few short years ago. So brace yourselves, readers, for indulgent project-sharing and ugly garments pics, ’cause things are about to get stitchy.