Auto-Immune Heresy: A Memoir

I wrote these pages out of a need to speak. To give voice to an experience that has been mine, and is infinitely larger than me. I am speaking about sickness. Long-lived, recurrent, and entangled with the entire 21st century into which I was born.

You can buy it directly from me by clicking here.

Auto-Immune Heresy collects 8 years of writing about 20 years of chronic illness. This book project is a means of re-narrativizing my life. It follows my thinking and feeling through the complexities of embodiment.

The book recounts a mythopoetic account of chronic sickness and perpetual healing, bridging personal narrative, poetry, and essay. The project is first a memoir steeped in a 20 year personal history with the diagnosis of chronic immune thrombocytopenia, an uncommon autoimmune condition. Second, it weaves critiques of health/healthcare with notions of disability justice, in tandem with my personal reflections on living with blindness and being trans. These personal storylines are told against a backdrop of coming to terms with attempting to live a sacred life and accepting the collapse of cultural narrative amidst the widespread denial of climate change.

Autoimmunity is not the body attacking itself. It is disrupted alchemy. It is a high-fidelity signal that the terrain has become unlivable.

For decades, I was taught to view my biology as a mutiny. I spent my youth transiting in and out of hospitals, managing Immune Thrombocytopenia. I sat in clinical recliners with my veins tethered to intravenous immunoglobulin—a product prepared from the pooled serum of thousands of unknown donors. The medical system kept me alive, but it framed my body as a battlefield and my cells as the enemy.

Auto-Immune Heresy is the refusal of that metaphor. It is a record of navigation. It follows my thinking and feeling through the complexities of embodiment. This project is one of inscribing questions rather than alleging answers. Making a hypersigil of healing from the false and harmful notions that shaped my body’s systems. The story is foremost one of healing. Healing as a practice and process that is ongoing without end. The principal actors in the story are my body, the patient (an abstraction of me), maman, the doctors, and the bloodstream extending beyond humanity. My wish is that the story helps others feel seen. You and I are not alone.

This memoir traces the long, slow process of dropping the vocabulary of war. It moves from the pediatric hematology wards of Vancouver to the study of somatics, tracking how a body metabolizes what has been imposed on it. It examines the market for blood, the biopolitics of chronic illness, and what my blind right eye taught me about sensing shifts in density rather than merely scanning the surface.

You cannot bomb a body into health. This book is an archeological dig into what remains when the fighting stops, and how we might learn to steer the craft through difficult weather.

“ASSEZ! Nous nous mutinons. Nous fermons l’usine où nous fabriquons le sang, où nous dosons les globules rouges et les globules blancs.” — Louky Bersianik

“The things of this world exist, they are; you cannot refuse them. — Ursula K. Le Guin rendering the Tao Te Ching

I believe it is a challenging book. It was difficult to write, and I regard it still as an imperfect offering. But it is what I have to give in this moment.

The cover art work is by my friend Meagan Chaput.

Contents Include

Questions For A Blood Doctor: On the vampiric economics of plasma and the soft repression of becoming bureaucratic data.
General Guidelines: The rules we are given for living in bodies that hurt, and the rules we must write ourselves.
A Chameleon Ethic: Adapting to the constant fluctuation of capacity.
Total Hyphema and Childhood: On the accident that cost my functional sight, and the blind gain that followed.