Rachel Bean
1 min readFeb 11, 2021

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dispatch from collapse: wordless

I’ve been writing. Notes in my phone. Drafts of things in Google drive. But I’ve also had a crash- people in the ME/CFS world call it post-exertional malaise. A spike of symptoms leaving me almost wordless. Something those who know me would struggle to believe- I’m not one to be short on words.

So little brain function that sometimes only tears leak out where speech should be. I want to be writing whole essays of thoughts and ideas. I want to be writing pages long love letters to my friends and comrades. I want to be speaking possibilities into fruition. I want to be ranting about local politics, white supremacy, or why bananas are bad, actually. I want lay in the dark with my babe telling the story of our future.

Instead I wrote 4 postcards and these two paragraphs and now I have to go lay down and quiet my brain because even thinking about words is exertion I can’t afford.

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