In 2024 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune illness and it completely reframed my perspective on climate emergency.

Content preview: brief descriptions of medical misogyny; medical symptoms including bleeding, fainting; and eco anxiety

This was a culminating experience for me. After years of disparate symptoms that in doctors offices I was told amounted to nothing but feminine anxiety, I finally sat in front of a compassionate and knowledgeable rheumatologist who listened to the full extent of my symptoms and told me, "You definitely have Primary Sjögren's." (Pronounced: SHOW-grins)

I was sitting in a swelteringly hot warehouse-style room on a metal folding chair across from him after waiting 5 hours on an screened porch in the afternoon heat, contemporary Christian music playing in the background. My heart was racing in my chest, a symptom of low blood pressure. I had prepared myself with a pink accordion folder filled with printouts of medical testing done in the past year to prove to someone, anyone that it was not simply anxiety. My ANA was positive. My ESR was high. A nephrologist in Mexico had told me it might be lupus. I was geared up for a fight, but within 10 minutes I had an autoimmune diagnosis instead. My shoulders relaxed, my lips pressed together, my eyes burning from lack of tears, I asked, "Are you sure?" I needed to make certain he really meant it after spending the last 18 months bleeding from the mouth daily and passing out every afternoon from low blood pressure.

Having some kind of explanation for my incapacity was a huge relief, despite the chronic illness diagnosis. So was having prescription medication, and being treated for something that was more specific than generalized anxiety which involved being prescribed breathing exercises, "calming down", and psychotherapy. You cannot deep breathe or talk-therapy your way out of an auto-immune crisis, it turns out. And as much as I love plant medicine, I had also reached the limit of what I could do to treat myself with my herbal allies, or Plantcestors as I sometimes call them. One day I will write about the promising master plants of the Amazon rainforest that I've learned do offer relief from autoimmune crisis. But for now I will focus on the gratitude I felt for a medical doctor to prescribe me hydroxychloroquine, a malaria medicine, and mycophenolate mofetil, an immune-suppressant drug often given to organ transplant recipients, that finally ended the severe autoimmune symptoms I had been living with for the past nearly 10 years. And yes, all of this ties directly back to climate emergency. Stay with me.

During that visit I was also diagnosed with secondary Reynaud's disease, an autonomic illness that causes dysfunction of the blood vessel's tension in the extremities and face, causing them to constrict and lose blood flow in response to drops in temperature. Before my diagnosis I had just returned from spending 3 months in the mountains of Central Mexico to escape the extreme heat wave Belize had been enduring due to the El Niño of 2024. This phenomenon led to several months in Belize of high humidity and temperatures over 105 F, with multiple days in inland Cayo over 111 degrees Fahrenheit, skirting wet bulb temperatures. Daily I was passing out in the Spring from the effect of the heat in Belize due to autonomic dysfunction that prevented my body from regulating my blood pressure and body temperature in hot weather. Yet, in central Mexico my lips and hands were turning blue, going numb, and aching daily in response to the 50 F temperatures that I sincerely preferred over the heat. My body seemed to have a very narrow window of tolerance for only mild temperatures that our age of climate emergency is not able to offer me consistently. To treat the Reynaud's, my rheumatologist prescribed a daily low dose of aspirin to support better circulation.

As I learn more about what is happening with our planet, I begin to see that my body's dysregulated internal systems reflect the increasingly dysregulated ecosystems of this beautiful planet we are inhabiting.

Both types of dysregulation are caused by centuries of harm from colonial systems of extraction, oppression, and disrespect. Since receiving my diagnoses, I recognize a deeper sense of belonging and connectedness to our earth mother and a desire to communicate with and alongside her about our increasing distress.

This physical reality, this daily negotiation with an environment that reflects the dysregulation of my body, is my entry point into the climate conversation. I have so many ideas for what I want to say about this, and eventually I hope to get many of those ideas out here in Reflections. I'm not aiming for perfection here but mainly to share my thoughts, however incomplete, and to express curiosity to those who may engage with what I write about what these reflections surface for them.

I want to talk more about how the ambient temperature of the air at any given moment changes my experiences of my symptoms, including, the extreme heat in Belize leading me to believe I was dying from internal bleeding for several months. I want to talk about how the mildly chilly temperatures of Central Mexico led me to limb numbness and brain fog. I want to talk about how I was managing these symptoms and my emotions about them with somatic practices, which could sometimes provide me with periods of relief. But the core of what I want to say is that these extremes are what led me to understand that I am not immune to death by climate change as an non-resident North American living in Central America.

Some of you might know me from my work with Emergent Phoenix. What you may not know, because I have never shared it, is that I founded Emergent Phoenix in 2016 when I left my job in corporate America when I began to develop symptoms of what I now know was Sjögren's autoimmune disease while working 80 hours a week under immense stress. I knew that the non-profits and government social services jobs I had left for corporate insurance work in 2012 did not pay a living wage and had poor healthcare coverage. EP was my attempt to do work I was passionate about as a side-hustle to make up the difference in income from returning to public sector employment after moving from Virginia to Seattle earlier that year. Through Emergent Phoenix I offered herbalism services and products, coaching, facilitation, and abolitionist consulting services. Emergent Phoenix was my "rebirth" for pursuing purposeful work when I realized that I would never be able to depend on employment to fully support my needs for financial security. Due to being raised in a cult, and leaving it alone at 23 years old, I had to support myself entirely without the safety net of biological family.

However, despite my best laid plans, my health continued to collapse and I was laid off from my last two traditional jobs in the US due to disability in 2017, and again in early 2020. I had become unhoused in 2019 even before losing my job due to taking unpaid medical leave several times during the previous 18 months. The wet cold of the Pacific Northwest, and the hot smoky summers (due to wildfires) without air conditioning definitely impacted my health negatively, particularly the Reynaud's disease, which is not something I expected before moving there. Another things that negatively impacted me was the expectation that I would be able to successfully financially support myself alone as chronically ill person without a social safety net. I left Seattle in 2020.

I grew up and came of age being taught that climate change was something that was coming to disrupt life in the future. I no longer believe that. Life-threatening climate emergency is already here for millions of people with living with disabilities and chronic illnesses all over the world. This sounds morbid but really its just the truth. While relatively healthy, able-bodied people in places like the northern areas of Turtle Island and Europe might feel climate emergency is something that is coming soon enough to affect their children and grandchildren, for people like me and others living in any climate where the temperatures are variable-- like the Northern & Southern US, the Caribbean, central America, and other places in the subtropics, deserts, and coastal regions--climate collapse is already a public health and ecological emergency.

The climate apocalypse is already in progress.

Our climate anxiety is just... anxiety. And its not misplaced or paranoid anxiety, its a completely normal and appropriate response to what we are feeling in our bodies, on our skin, in the waters we swim and fish, and from the ground we walk on. This is what led me to develop what I call Climate Somatics. It is a practice I am living. I will share it here in its raw form to care for myself and others who are living consciously inside this emergency. Because I am not a doomer, and I am not hopeless about human and more-than-human survival of these crises. However, I do recognize that survival requires a many-pronged, strategic support and creative recovery plan, and I hope to contribute Climate Somatics as one of the many strategies we humans might explore with each other to increase our ability to survive, connect, and collaborate during these times of polycrises.

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