Though I haven’t written a zine for two years, now is the time I’ve decided to retire the Telegram title. I’ve written forty-two issues within fifteen years, devoting half of my lifetime to the project. These last two years, my unexpected early-30’s, are the longest I’ve gone without making a zine since the day I began. I’ve brainstormed multiple issues within that period, but eventually realized that the title and the form are no longer what I want to be creating within (working under? confined to?).

Quitting is hard to explain, especially since I am certainly not considering quitting writing, but the zine just feels over. Writing Telegram no longer challenges me, nor does it bring me pleasure or have much of a positive impact in my life. The topics I’ve covered in my zines don’t feel like they have anywhere else to go right now, at least not in that form. And I feel uncomfortably bound to the identity/ies I claimed through my zines that cannot wholly represent me anymore (not that they ever quite did). I’ve learned multiple times that working within particular labels can feel liberating at first, and then restrictive after all. Also, since becoming too ill for zinefests and the like to be accessible to me, and too ill to maintain correspondence, Telegram no longer connects me to the various friendships, cultures, or conversations that once sustained me. While I’m in remission from some of the worst aspects of fibromyalgia, the spaces I was previously operating within are not spaces I feel a desire (or a welcome) to return to. Such is the rift caused by ableism and inaccessibility.

Telegram #41 is about revelations, expectations, support and artivism, living through my fears, filling out forms, Mercury Retrograde, reminders, resistance, waitlists, crip-feelings, and a green candle.

More specifically, this zine is a text-heavy exploration of what happened with my body & psyche when my disability benefits came up for review and were threatened with being cut off, how it felt to be forced to crowdfund rent & food, casting spells to cope, applying for access to alternative transit for disabled folks when I could no longer use public transit, trying to make myself at least semi-comprehensible to social workers, hysteria, sickness, & haunting spaces while I’m still living.

Telegram #39 is about examining the ways poverty, trauma, and chronic pain shape & alter & distort my perceptions of myself, my body, and my imagination. It’s about being okay with not-belonging; chronic instability of home and health and communication; coping, caring, dreaming. Making connections. This is a zine about sickness, pain, and isolation, the damage poverty does to one’s psyche & body & soul, and surviving under capitalism. It’s a zine about falling & praying & breathing. Cards & candles & the irrational. Affirmations for crazy & sick & disabled weirdos. Magic as coping skills. Story-telling, story-exploring, storying. Asking questions.

Telegram #28 is about about publishing two books, book launches, tour-feelings, crying, changing, sometimes not-relating to my own writing vs. sometimes still relating too much, capital C Crazy identity, What I Really Mean When I Say “I Hate Myself,” friendship, Tarot & witchcraft, hating landlords forever, and leaving town.

Shortly after I decided to end my zine, I received an email from Beth Maiden at Little Red Tarot, letting us, her freelance columnists, know that she’ll be retiring the blog at the end of October, which means the end of See the Cripple Dance, my bi-weekly column exploring Tarot through a lens of disability, madness, and poverty. Somehow, the timing feels right.

Over the last year and a half of working with Beth and Tango as my editors as I wrote See the Cripple Dance, I’ve often struggled with how much of my personal life to share. Although I’m known for writing about vulnerable experiences and emotions, I also have a deeply private interior world, and ways of engaging with other creatures, and with the environment I live within, that aren’t covered in the writing I’ve done thus far. Maintaining privacy has always been important to me, but/and as someone who has documented their life so publicly for such a long time, it’s become an unsolvable struggle.

The personal in my writing is something I’ve intentionally chosen not (only) as a(n often inadequate) coping mechanism and means of survival and meaning-making, but as a way of providing specific examples of how a given individual life can play out within broader systems of societal organization and expectations; not only those of capitalism and ableism (to name the ones most often addressed in my writing) but within multiple more specific lived contexts, too: of writing as a high school dropout; of being psychologically-minded but with both a resistance to and a reclaiming of pathologization; and as a solitary creature who insists on finding the value and magic of my day-to-day life and imaginings, and having the audacity to publish those internal and external wanderings as if they mean(t) anything beyond my own psychebody.

While endings often provoke a form of bitterness and disappointment within me, lately I’ve been feeling sentimental. And relieved. I think I’m more of a sappy and romantic person than I’ve been able to recognize or allow myself to feel – I was gonna say moreso than I’ve been given the opportunity/ies to feel, but maybe I’m the one who has to make space for those kinds of moments. When I talk about undoing my habit of self-deprecation and sarcasm (which I often employ as a way of invalidating myself before somebody else can), I think about ways to invite my sentimentality and sappiness (a form of reverence?) to be unearthed and revealed.

Then, too, I’m approaching my thirty-third birthday, and I know this is the time of year when I want alterations and adjustments to how I live; reorganization, reconfiguration. I’ve been grieving a relationship that ended two months ago, and have spent that time recuperating from a hysterectomy as well. These two experiences would force a kind of reckoning on their own; that they’re happening in tandem seems oddly providential. I’ve felt a shedding of skins happening, or an emergence from a kind of cocoon. Meanwhile, I’m a Libra-baby with a mid-October birthday, so these kinds of endings on the witches’ calendar are synchronized with my own personal New Year.

For the sake of transparency, I will note that, yes, ending See the Cripple Dance will impact my income. When I was initially invited to write the column, I was paid $25 US per entry, and submitted two entries a month, except for when illness hindered my creativity, and for a couple months when I was burned out and took a hiatus. After a while, my payment was raised to $35 US per entry, and then $50 US. While no longer working on the column or the zines frees me up to work on the longer-term projects I’ve always got on the go but often neglect, I’ll no longer have these regular and irregular payments to supplement social assistance.

The best way you can support me and my writing is to buy the zines that remain, and tell yr friends about them; buy my books and review them; and compensate me for my writing via Paypal. Right now, my annual fee of $200 to keep my P.O. Box is due, I haven’t been able to dumpster food as often as I had been while my body recovers from surgery, and I’ve been trying to see my acupuncturist more regularly after not being able to go for several years (mainly seeking treatment to cope with irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, and grief). (If you contributed toward the costs of recovering from surgery, thank you! I wasn’t able to respond to each reader individually, but I was able to buy food, return to community acupuncture, (partly) process the un/expected upheaval of this Summer through Chani Nicholas’s astrology courses, and purchase a foldable laptop tray to write in bed, a dreamy tender point / acupressure massager, and a few much-desired and appreciated books.)

Last year, I wrote about art and social assistance, asking, Is there such a thing as art about social assistance? By people on social assistance (whether it’s welfare or disability)? I connected it to my Wishlist, gathering books as part of a longer-term project that’s not exactly an answer to these questions, but a provocation of further thoughts and questions. Since then, the province of Ontario elected a Conservative government that, among other things, has been making cuts to social assistance incomes that will further harm (and honestly, sometimes kill) those of us who are poor, disabled, and/or mentally ill or mad. This, too, deeply affected my mental health this Summer, resulting in a new process of naming my values, what I love about myself, and who I want to share my time, mind, and body with. I keep a note above my desk where I’ve written: “Poverty is not a moral failure. It is a tool of political violence.” Always a necessary reminder.

I’ve still got a boxful of zines in my closet, and I’ve marked them down from $3 to $1 in an attempt to clear space, both physically and psychically. They’ll remain $1 until they’re gone. And I’ll be writing a few more See the Cripple Dance columns, after which they’ll be archived and remain available online. Also, I’ll continue reading Tarot for misfits and outcasts. Thanks so much for supporting my work!

Endingly Yours,

P.S.: If you’ve benefited from my writing in any way – if my words have inspired you, helped you feel less alone, or sparked some weird feeling within you; if you’ve felt encouraged, or curious, or comforted – please consider compensating me by offering a donation of any amount. Whether you’ve been reading my writing for years, or just stumbled into me this afternoon, I invite you to help me sustain the process!