How My Relationship With My Body Changed This Year

2025 vs. 2026

Content Notes

Discussion of chronic illness, disability, seizures, hospitalization, assisted suicide legislation (non-graphic, non-instructional), emotional vulnerability, medical trauma, self-care, and rest.

Welcome back to the Den.

The lights are low. The rules are flexible. Nobody here expects you to be brave on command.

This is The Crippled Cryptid.

A soft-lit corner of the internet where disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and everyday survival exist without apology.

If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.

Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Medically interesting enough to make half my providers sigh when they open my chart. I sigh too. Then I ask for coffee.

I live in a haunted meat suit with a deeply suspicious warranty, spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, and am almost never alone thanks to my medical alert service dog, Luna.

Part guardian.
Part shadow.
Part “excuse me, Mama. Sit your ass down. Right now.”

Then there’s M&M.

My constant. My Player Two. The one who gives ninety percent when I only have ten. Garden gremlin. Best friend. The person who shows up without being asked and stays without needing applause.

But let’s face it, she totally deserves the applause.

This space is about showing up for ourselves even when our bodies refuse to cooperate.

Chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Disability without apologies.
Love without pretending it’s always easy.

(But always comes with at least a little dog fur.)

Returning cryptids, welcome home.
New cryptids, pull up a chair.

The Lunatic Café is open.
The Den is big enough for all of us.

On Today’s Menu: My Body, This Year & How Our Relationship Changed.

This is one of those posts I thought I’d publish at the end of 2025. A quiet closing-the-book moment.

And then my body threw a wrench directly into the narrative.

I started having seizures.

Because my birthday is coming up soon, I decided to write this anyway. Not as a neat conclusion, but as a snapshot. A pause button. A truth caught mid-breath.

Before we go any further, I need to say this clearly.

I’m okay.

I know posts like this can ring alarm bells. Especially now, especially with assisted suicide being legal here in Illinois for people who qualify.

I want to say this without shame, without judgment, and without distance: I would never shame someone with chronic illness for making that choice.

But where I am right now, that isn’t my path.
It isn’t something I’m planning.
It isn’t something I’m moving toward.

I am here. I am alive. I am choosing to stay.

This post isn’t about wanting to disappear.
It’s about learning how to remain.

Trust, Rewritten

I started drafting this at the beginning of December 2025. It was supposed to be the last post of the year.

Instead, it became something else. It became a draft that I tucked away and avoided.

This year, my relationship with my body changed in ways I didn’t expect.

I learned there are times when my body is not something I can trust.

And I’m learning how to live with that.

Not in a minimizing way.
Not in a “positive vibes only” way.

In a disabled way.

Being disabled isn’t new to me. That’s something I’ve known for a long time.

The seizures are new.

And new things rearrange the furniture.

I’m also learning something else- how fragile trust can be when it’s broken by the systems meant to protect you.

Shortly after the seizures started, I learned that my DRG was never fully removed in March of 2024 the way I had been told it was. A chapter I thought was closed was still quietly, painfully unfinished.

There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with that realization. Not just physical, but emotional. The kind that makes it harder to consent to care, harder to believe reassurances, harder to hand your body over to anyone ever again.

Getting it “removed” the first time was hard.

Facing the possibility of doing it again feels almost impossible- even if I don’t know yet when, or how, that will happen.

Learning to Trust What Carries Me

This year, I learned how to trust Luna more.

You might think she isn’t part of my body.

But when you train a service dog, when you rely on them to notice what you can’t, to interrupt what you don’t feel coming, to keep you upright and breathing and grounded- the line gets blurry.

She’s part of how I move through the world now.

Trusting her is something I have to keep learning.
Because if I don’t trust her, I can’t trust myself the way I need to in order to exist out there.

The same is true for M&M.

If I didn’t trust her, I don’t know where I’d be.

I might still be on the floor in the other room, where I had my second seizure. Panicking. Alone.

She had my back.

Literally.

And in every other way that matters.

She’s the person I go to when something isn’t right- whether that something is physical, emotional, or the quiet sense that the world has tilted half a degree off-axis.

With her, I don’t have to carry everything by myself.

Relying on others didn’t make me smaller.
It made me safer.

Bed Jail™, Rest, and Self-Compassion

One thing I realized in 2026, even though we’re only a month in, is that Bed Jail™ doesn’t have to be a punishment.

After my first seizure, I treated it that way. I thought it was a punishment- a reflection of what my body had done.

It isn’t.

Rest is important. It should be allowed. I need to allow myself to rest when I need it, even if I’m not always great at noticing when or where that is.

And that’s another place where I’m lucky to have M&M and Luna.
They help me recognize when it’s time to pause, breathe, and recover.

What Changed

I think this is the biggest shift.

I used to bottle everything until it exploded.

Pain.
Fear.
Grief.
Anger.

I’d go to the doctor when I had to. I’d go to the hospital when things got scary.

But my emotional and mental well-being were always treated like optional add-ons.

This year taught me they aren’t optional.

This year taught me that survival isn’t just about making it through the medical stuff.

It’s about letting yourself be witnessed.

It’s about trusting the systems you’ve built.

It’s about learning that needing help doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

Sometimes it just means you’re still here.

If today felt heavy, thank you for carrying it with me.

If it felt familiar, I’m glad you stayed.

If you’re here, you belong here.

Love you.
Now say it back.

-Sky

© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, honesty, and a little chaos.

🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa

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