Content note: this episode includes me breaking down while recording and frank talk about chronic illness, pain, and graphic medical/GI symptoms.

Reflections on chronic illness, neurodivergence, and finding kinship across five centuries.

I sat down to tell you about Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century mystic who was chronically ill, almost certainly neurodivergent and queer, and someone the Church never knew what to do with. She wrote one of the most extraordinary maps of the interior life ever put on paper and she wrote it while sick, while under the Inquisition, while her body did things no one around her could explain.

I had the whole episode outlined and ready to go. And then my body wouldn't cooperate while recording. My brain turned to waterfalls, the words wouldn't come, and I fell apart trying to do the one thing I  ...