Disabled Queers Exist

These artworks reflect my inner world, shaped by the ongoing battle of living with a chronic illness. They also capture the most severe period of my life—when I spent two years in bed after medication worsened my health. Through these pieces, I explore the destruction and profound loss this illness has inflicted on me, a silent war that feels like it is tearing apart everything I once knew.

At times, it felt like I was trapped in an endless, dark tunnel. I no longer felt alive, nor dead, existing somewhere in between—days slipped by, one after another, as I lost pieces of my life, until there was almost nothing left to lose. A world and body that once seemed vast and familiar became minuscule and unsafe.

How did I end up here? So far away from the life I felt I was meant to live, the world I wanted to explore, having received the blessing of birth, but at the same time the burden of not fulfilling its very purpose.

I’ve often wondered if the world could truly understand the depth of this kind of grief—the kind that seeps into your bones.

I was forced to navigate this vast unknown alone, to search for my own answers. Hope is what got me through. Learning to live freely inside my imagination, while my body was imprisoned, was the only way to withstand solitary confinement without losing my mind.

Eventually, slowly but surely, I emerged from being bedbound. The light returned to my eyes, but the destruction and scars remained.