Content Note: Chronic illness, migraines, grief, family complexity, emotional vulnerability, creative burnout/revival.
Welcome to The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and survival without the performance.
If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Occasional chronic illness and disability advocate.
Medically complex enough to make my chart a jump scare.
I cope with sarcasm, snacks… and an ever-growing pile of drafts.
Most days are lived in a haunted meat suit with a questionable warranty and a long-standing feud with my nervous system.
Some days, though, we make things anyway.
Stories.
Worlds.
Half-finished sentences that glare at me from across the room.
The Den (a.k.a. Not Bed Jail This Time)
This week, and last week, I’ve been upstairs.
Not in Bed Jail™. Not horizontal. Not negotiating with gravity like it personally wronged me.
Don’t worry, it has. I have the Nurtec wrappers to prove it- we’re just trying to ignore that.
Upstairs. Sitting by the window. Watching the birds argue like tiny feathery landlords. Writing.
Despite the migraines.
Despite the weather doing that chaotic “is it spring or is this a trap?” routine.
Despite my body trying to unionize against me.
🐾 Luna Interjection:
Tornado Watch means we do not type.
Flood Watch means we do not type.
Thunderstorm Warning means we DEFINITELY do not type.
I have filed multiple complaints. None have been respected.
And, of course, under the watchful supervision of Luna.
Guardian. Enforcer. Service Dingo™.
CEO of “You’ve Been Typing Too Long, Fix It.”
She’s been hovering. Not subtly.
The kind of hovering that says, “I love you deeply, but I will physically insert myself between you and your bad decisions.”
🐾 Luna Interjection:
The sky is yelling. The wind is suspicious. The barometric pressure is a personal attack.
Mumther is trying to “focus.” I am trying to keep her alive. These goals are not aligned.
The Workbench This Week
Welcome to the Wyrm Workbench.
Where we track word counts, chase ideas, and occasionally wrestle a story into existence.
Pull up a chair. Bring caffeine. Hydrate. Acquire sour candy. This is non-negotiable.
This week?
We actually wrote.
Like… wrote wrote.
🐾 Luna Interjection:
She wrote during a storm.
I would like that on record.
I was there. Supervising. Suffering.
New Project: “Where Marigolds Grow”
Out of nowhere, like a cryptid sighting you’re not entirely sure anyone will believe, a new story showed up.
“Where Marigolds Grow.”
I took it from absolute zero to about 2,000 words.
That includes:
- Character building
- Opening scenes
- Half of chapter one
And maybe more importantly… momentum.
There’s something electric about beginning. About proving to yourself that the well isn’t empty, just stubborn.
WIP Update: “Addie Unwritten”
You knew this one as The Stubborn One™.
It’s officially called “Addie Unwritten” now. (Subject to change, because titles are slippery little creatures.)
At the start of the week: 22,000 words
Where we are now: 25,000 words
That’s 3,000 words wrestled out of a story that refused to move for two weeks.
And yeah, I was still working. Notes app scraps. iPad fragments. Little narrative bones scattered everywhere.
But now? It’s moving again.
Is it perfect? No.
Is it a rough draft? Absolutely.
Does it count? Every single word.
Current projection: aiming for 50–75k, but let’s be honest… it’s already giving “I might be longer than that” energy.
The Unnamed Project (a.k.a. The Identity Crisis)
There’s another one.
This one is… complicated.
Older. The one that I started drafting in high school, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
Eight drafts.
Each sitting between 6–8k words.
All circling the same idea. None quite landing.
It’s not stuck. It’s… searching.
Like it hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet, and I’m just the poor soul holding the flashlight while it figures itself out.
I don’t think I’m ready to scrap it.
But I also don’t think I’ve met its final form yet.
The Quiet Shift
Something else has been happening under all of this.
Since meeting my biological father, I’ve been thinking about my writing differently.
That sentence still feels strange to say out loud.
But it’s stirred something.
🐾 Luna Interjection:
He threw my ball.
He said I was a good girl.
I have reached a professional conclusion.
(For legal reasons, this is the highest endorsement she gives.)
There’s a part of me that trusts that instinct.
You know the saying. If my dog doesn’t like you, neither do I.
She didn’t hesitate.
And maybe that made it a little easier for me not to, either.
I’ve been thinking about:
- Republishing my old poetry collections
- Adding new poems
- Illustrating them with margin doodles and little pieces of myself
- Revisiting older work… and giving it teeth, or softness, or both
It would take a lot.
A lot of spoons.
A lot of emotional bandwidth.
And there’s grief tangled up in it.
My mom and my grandmother won’t be here to see it this time.
That part doesn’t get easier just because time keeps moving.
But…
There are people here now.
People who would see it.
Who would hold it.
Who would care.
And I think they deserve to.
Maybe I do too.
Why This Week Matters
This wasn’t a miracle week.
I was still in pain.
Still dealing with migraines.
Still navigating a body that doesn’t always cooperate.
But I showed up anyway.
I sat upstairs.
I watched the birds.
I wrote between symptoms instead of waiting for them to disappear.
🐾 Luna Interjection:
She didn’t wait to feel better.
She just… stayed.
So I stayed too.
And somehow, the words came back.
Not perfectly. Not cleanly.
But they came back.
If You’re In It Too
If you’ve ever stared down a blank page and felt it stare back…
You’re not alone.
If your progress is slow, messy, inconsistent, or held together with duct tape and spite…
It still counts.
If you’re building something in pieces, in pauses, in stolen moments between everything else…
It still counts.
We build what we can, when we can.
That’s enough.
Workbench Check-Out
Did we hit the word count?
Who knows.
Did we try?
Debatable.
Did we show up?
Yeah.
That’s the one that matters.
Do you have something like that?
Something pulling you forward, even when part of you wants to disappear back into the fog?
🐾 Luna Status Report
- Weather Concerns: Severe. Unacceptable.
- Human Supervision Required: Constant
- Break Enforcement: Aggressive
- Side-Eye Frequency: Elevated
- Naps Taken: Not enough (because SOMEONE insisted on “writing”)
- Overall Verdict: Mumther survived. I did my job.
Love you. Now say it back.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability. Honesty. A little chaos.
(Maybe a few unfinished drafts.)
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
There’s never pressure to donate. Reading, sharing, or simply staying is more than enough.
If you’d like to support the long, slow work of staying alive, stable, and mobile:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility
Leave a comment