191. Tell the Truth – Jessica Slice
From community member Audrey Lawson’s 100-day project
Reading poetry and journaling became my lifeline. I started each morning with two reminders at the top of the page.
In August of 2011, while on a hike in Santorini, I became sick, and two years later I still hadn’t recovered. A geneticist later gave me a diagnosis: a disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) had led to dysautonomia. (My weakened connective tissue had compromised my body’s ability to regulate my heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and body temperature.) Every morning during the summer of 2013, I woke up nauseated and dizzy and crawled from my bed to my thrifted yellow sofa. I curled up there with a cup of coffee, my journal, some books of poetry, and my dog, Ben Nevis.
As my body shrunk and yellowed and tiny hairs grew from my back due to malnutrition, the defining layers of my life sloughed off—my marriage, my ability to work, my identity as a runner. What was left felt like it could disintegrate at any moment. Waking each day in physical agony to an uncertain future, I worried that some rottenness at my core had brought on all of these losses.
Reading poetry and journaling became my lifeline. I started each morning with two reminders at the top of the page:
Listen
Tell the truth
I was rebuilding my life from scratch, and I wanted it to be honest. But I worried that as soon as I focused on something, it would vanish. To feel more substantial, I made lists of “things that are true about me,” and noted characteristics that were permanent—unlike my fears, which ebbed and flowed. Some days, my lists were short.
I like coffee.
I laugh a lot.
When hope was easier to find, the lists grew longer.
I love my sisters.
I feel the most alive around other people.
Poetry cracks me open.
I am kind to Ben Nevis.
It’s now been eleven years since the hike, and I still wake up every day in physical discomfort. I am disabled. Still, I have built an honest and full life—writing in the mornings, finding new love in a second marriage, and parenting my vibrant son. On hard days, I still make lists of things that are true.
My love for my son feels like a balloon that comes out of my chest and wraps around him.
My husband is deeply good, and we are kind to each other.
Our house is full of laughter, and I helped create that.
Writing down the truth makes me feel alive.
I keep going.
– Jessica Slice
