where grit meets grace on the page

(an afterparty nobody wanted but everyone feels)

By Kelly Lynn Curry

From the book A Fragile Thing with Fangs

There’s a storm beneath my ribs,

a frenzied, churning sea.

It lashes at my stomach,

dragging its nails down my internal walls,

a pain so sharp

it bends my back

into a question I could never answer.

The ache spills out,

a thief with searing hot hands,

pressing into my spine,

curling up to the nerves until they scream.

They know this betrayal all too well.

Here I am,

shaking,

not from cold

and not from fear,

but from the weight of this relentless pain.

It doesn’t ask permission

as it makes its home buried in my body.

I press my hands deep into the couch cushions

and my knuckles turn a milky white.

I am trying to hold it in,

to pull myself together,

but this kind of pain

it pulls,

it claws,

it shatters my thoughts,

And all I can do is try to breathe,

if only to remind my ribs that I’m still here,

By Kelly Lynn Curry

(From the upcoming collection: The Pattern of Almost)

The pain wakes first

a dangerous hymn clawing its way

up my back’s bleached white stairwell.

It unravels in the quiet stabbing of tissue

No, not quite stabbing

It sticks its claws

through the muscle of me,

a slow drag against the marrow.

winding itself like a vice tightening

Into the soft meat of my spine

Each muscle knots like a noose

around its own spasms,

a slow strangling dressed as dusk.

Fire and ice flood into the night.

Every part of me holds its breath,

a choir of clenched fists

singing through gritted teeth.

My nerves snarl beneath the skin,

They are a pack of wolves pacing the fence line,

teeth bared at the moon.

My muscles whisper in a language

made of splinters and tears,

their quiet implosion louder

than the ability to sleep.

Sleep waits at the far end of the room,

hands folded and patient,

while my body thrashes

against itself.

Pain is a pale thing with empty eyes,

Staring from the corner

while something in my voice cracks

As I beg the dark to stop singing

maybe it is a locked door,

and I am all bruised knuckles,

feral breath,

Chomping at the bit

By Kelly Lynn Curry

(Prompt: Exhaustion sounds like….)

Exhaustion sounds like a house in deep winter:

pipes knocking somewhere behind the walls,

the refrigerator’s endless mechanical sigh,

floorboards that shift beneath the weight of another restless night.

It is not the silence people hear when they look at me.

It is machinery pushed past its limits:

belts slipping from worn gears,

an engine idling on fumes,

the thin metallic whine of something valuable

working harder than it was ever built to.

It sounds like a cat knocking silverware

in the empty sink at 3 a.m.,

like tires hissing over rain drenched asphalt,

like wet coats dripping onto the nice hardwood floors

after miles of bad weather

My body becomes a shoreline

littered with a catastrophic wreckage,

every joint another splintered beam,

every tendon a frayed rope swollen with saltwater.

Even my heartbeat hits exhaustedly,

dragging itself across my ribcage

like a survivor carrying too many names

through the smoke after the building has already imploded.

And beneath it all, there is the terrible sound of wanting

wanting to rise,

wanting to do something, anything

wanting to become someone whose bones

do not fight over ordinary things.

Exhaustion sounds like a pocketknife folding shut.

Like moth wings battering themselves

violently against a beaming porch light.

Like a language forgetting its own vowels.

It is the soft, relentless scrape of me against myself,

like a river undressing a deer’s femur beneath the current,

stripping it clean grain by grain

so even the marrow forgets its name.

That is until all that remains is this:

the hiss of a match burning down to my fingertips

my skin curling around the heat

And I somehow still mistake the sting

By Kelly Lynn Curry

I didn’t gain the weight.

I inherited it.

From sleepless nights,

from doctors who shrugged their shoulders,

from a body that betrayed me with every breath

and left me bed-bound,

half-human, half-haunting.

The pain screamed,

so I fed it.

Spoon by spoon.

A soft riot of chocolate and denial

until the silence was sugared-coated,

and my ribs forgot how to echo.

It wasn’t hunger.

It was grief with frosting.

Thighs stick like bad decisions

mine held fast,

each inch a record of vows made,

and broken,

in the name of mercy that bled like nectar.

Chocolate tastes like a lie now.

It doesn’t whisper safety.

Just guilt and blood sugar spikes,

and the memory of hiding

in a body that moved like mourning.

The weight is gone,

The ghost,

but the mess remains.

the ache,

it’s metamorphosis

with a mouthful of blood.

I am the hunger that survived the feast.

And this pain?

It’s mine

(a love story between this body

and the life it still insists on)

By Kelly Lynn Curry

At first, it is only a splinter.

A pinprick beneath the fingernail.

A bead of static caught in the jaw.

But then pain unsheathes itself.

It comes in hot

It carries many rows of razor sharp teeth,

It’s a rusted trap snapping shut

around the base of my spine.

My nerves gnash like stray dogs

fighting in the alley behind my ribs.

Muscle turns to barbed wire,

each movement dragging skin

through a sharp-toothed fence.

My joints fill with jagged pieces of glass.

My bones taste of iron.

There is the sting of blood drenched in copper

lingering in my mouth.

I feel it all

The sandpaper scrape of sheets

against skin gone electric.

A hot coin pressed to the knee.

The wet cement heaviness

settling in my thighs.

The nest of wasps throbbing

buried deep in my right shoulder.

It’s in the way every breath can feel

like swallowing nails.

So I take it one small silver-lined prayer at a time.

I wake every morning facing the unknown of my body.

Still, coffee blooms bitter and dark

across my tongue.

Still, the cat climbs into my lap,

all mustard eyes and unapologetic weight,

his purr a small engine

rattling against the places that hurt.

Still, my love lays a hand on my back

as if touching a wounded animal

that has finally learned

not every hand is there to capture and create pain.

This life is not beautiful

because it is painless.

It is beautiful

because pain has not managed

to strip it bare.

And some days my body bites.

Some days it shakes me

like a fox with something fragile

between its teeth.

But I have learned to bite back.

I laugh with a mouth full of iron.

I kiss even with my joints blazing like a 5-alarm fire.

I make art from the animal noises

dragged from my throat at 3 a.m.

I gather tenderness

with open and bloodied hands.

Hope, I have learned,

is not a soft thing.

It is a creature with a torn ear

and one good eye,

scarred,

suspicious,

Yet it chooses to crawl into the light.

It bares its teeth.

It purrs loudly

By Kelly Lynn Curry

From the upcoming book: The Pattern of Almost

I get nervous anyway,

even when the doctor is kind,

even when his voice does not sound

like the suspense before impact,

even when he looks at me like a person

instead of a chart with too many footnotes.

My body does not care about credentials.

It remembers fluorescent rooms,

the sterile language of bad news,

how hope can enter dressed in a white coat

(Proof that Delicate isn’t the same as Safe)

By Kelly Lynn Curry

From the book A Fragile Thing with Fangs

I am the soft thing they warned you about,

the one put together with gauze and spite,

My mouth sweetly rimmed with sugar,

Yet I splinter behind every polite smile.

They said fragility means breakable.

They forgot that glass can cut.

That a petal can wilt into a weapon,

that bruises can bite.

I have finally learned the anatomy of this aftermath,

the violence of my blood being rerouted,

the hollowness of this pulse gone rogue.

This way of surviving makes me

sharpen my teeth

in the dark.

So, I smile,

fangs showing,

a little threat,

a soft battle cry.

Call it delicate if you dare,

There is a particular kind of injury that lands with all the force of a bruise without really leaving one. Some wounds are made by what happens after the body speaks and no one believes it.

There is something deeply damaging about being denied validation when you live with a disability. Pain is already so isolating on its own. It requires a person to become intimate with loss. Not always a dramatic loss, though that is often the case, too. It is built from smaller, quieter thefts. The steady pickpocketing of energy. The vanishing easiness of ordinary things. The way your body can turn on you in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day and suddenly everything is arranged around deafening pain. A simple errand becomes a calculation. A plan becomes a risk assessment. Rest becomes less of a luxury and more of a sentence handed down by a body that has exceeded itself again. There is grief in that, in the constant reconfiguring, and in having to build a life around what hurts. It asks you to make a thousand small compromises no one else sees. You have to carry all of that, and then somehow you can also be met with disbelief, dismissal, or silence (Crazy, I know!). That is its own kind of destruction. It teaches a person to question their own suffering even while they are still actively enduring it. As if the pain only exists in the moments when it is visible enough, ugly enough, or dramatic enough to satisfy someone else’s idea of what pain should look like.

It does something corrosive to the spirit. It makes you feel stranded inside your own body, as if the evidence of your pain is somehow not enough unless it becomes legible to someone else. It does not merely hurt your feelings. It alters the state inside of you. It makes you feel estranged from your own reality, as if what you are living through must be translated into language more palatable so someone will call it real. It can make you feel ashamed for needing rest, ashamed for speaking honestly, and ashamed for the plain fact that you’re hurting. You find yourself reaching for cleaner words, smaller words, less alarming words. You sand down the edges of your own pain. You try to present it neatly, as if suffering is only worthy of compassion when it arrives well-dressed and easy to understand. It teaches you to smile through what is breaking you. To become quieter about your suffering because being disbelieved hurts almost as much as the pain itself. Sometimes more. Because pain is terrible, yes, but being told in a hundred subtle or obvious ways that your pain does not count can hollow a person out. You start to doubt what your body has been telling you in plain speech. You start apologizing for your limitations as if pain were a breach of etiquette, as if exhaustion were a personality flaw, or as if the body’s failings were somehow a failure of character. You can feel the humiliation in their need for you to produce evidence for what you endure. Proof. Documentation. A body of exhibits. Here is the fatigue. Here is the flare. Here is the pain I could not hide quickly enough. Here is the wreck. It is brutal to stand trial in your own suffering.

What I think people fail to understand is that validation is not pity. It is not dramatics. It is not asking for a parade of apologies or some theatrical performance of concern. It is not asking to be turned into a tragedy that someone else can feel noble for witnessing. It is simply mercy met with honesty. It is basic human compassion. It is the simple and sacred act of saying:

I believe you. I know this is hard. I can see that you are carrying something heavy.

That kind of recognition does not fix the body, but it can keep the soul from collapsing under the loneliness of it all.

What has been hardest for me is not the ignorance of strangers. Strangers only see fragments. They catch a glimpse of the edited version, the public-facing body, the one that has learned how to survive while being observed. What cuts deeper is when the denial comes from someone who has stood close enough to witness the destruction. Someone who has had a front-row seat to the wake of it all. Someone who has seen the exhaustion that clings to me like a second skin. Someone who has seen what pain has made my days become, how it has gnawed at the edges of my life, how it has threaded itself through routine after routine until suffering became part of the foundation. I do not understand how someone can stand that near to another person and still deny what is right in front of them. I do not understand how someone can claim closeness while refusing the most basic truth of your existence. You cannot say you care about someone while dismissing the reality of their pain. You cannot love someone while treating their pain like an exaggeration, an inconvenience, or a fiction you would rather not acknowledge.

That kind of betrayal is its own bleak education, and at some point, the truth becomes unavoidable: people who deny your pain are not as close to you as they pretend to be. It teaches you that proximity is not the same thing as compassion. Just because someone has been in your orbit does not mean they have truly been with you. Sometimes it simply means someone has had a better view of your suffering while they remain committed to misunderstanding it. There is something almost unspeakably lonely about that. To have your pain witnessed and still refused. To have your life leave evidence everywhere and still be treated as though you are asking for too much by asking for basic acknowledgement. That person has already placed distance between you. They have chosen it. They have made themselves strangers to a suffering they were asked to witness with honesty and gentleness.

That kind of denial leaves a wound no one else can see. It settles in the body and does something feral to the nervous system. It makes you brace before speaking. It makes vulnerability feel like handing your ribs to someone who has already shown you they do not mind where they press down. It makes trust feel dangerous. It makes vulnerability feel expensive. You start measuring your words. You start rationing your truth. You start deciding, with exhausted precision, which parts of your suffering are safe enough to bring into the room and which to keep hidden so you do not have to survive the added insult of disbelief on top of the pain.

It teaches you that some people would rather protect their comfort than face the truth of what you endure. There is grief in that. Real grief. The grief of realizing that being known by someone is not the same as being understood. That is what people do not understand: denial does not simply fail to comfort. It compounds the damage. Pain is already heavy. Disbelief makes it heavier. Suffering is already isolating. Denial turns the isolation into part of your construction. It builds walls inside a person. It teaches them to go quiet when really they need gentle words. It teaches them that even love, or what calls itself love, may refuse to believe the truth. There is grief in the realization that they would rather call you difficult than admit that you are hurting. The grief in finding out that some people need your pain to be smaller, tidier, and less inconvenient than it is, and if it refuses to become that, they will make a character flaw out of your suffering instead.

I do not need my pain translated into spectacle to make it real. I do not need it notarized by someone else. I know what I carry. I know the private mathematics of endurance. I know what it is to wake up already behind on strength. I know what it is to negotiate with a body that keeps changing the terms and conditions. I know now that being doubted by people close to me is not a reflection of my suffering. It is a reflection of the limits of their empathy.

That realization has hurt, but it has also clarified things because I am grateful, deeply grateful, for the people who do understand. And for the people who may not fully understand but who try with sincerity, softness, and care. The ones who listen. The ones who believe me. The ones who do not make me drag my pain into the light and dress it up in acceptable language just to earn basic compassion. The ones who meet my reality with tenderness instead of suspicion. They are a kind of sanctuary. A reminder that empathy still exists. A reminder that I am not asking for too much by wanting to be treated like my suffering is real.

As for the rest, I am learning that distance is not cruelty. It is protection. It is self-respect. It is the quiet refusal to keep offering my truth to people who handle it without care. I am done forcing myself to remain available to that kind of harm. I am done confusing access with closeness. I do not have room in my life for those with no compassion, no empathy, no willingness to see me clearly. I have spent too much time surviving to keep begging for humanity from people committed to withholding it.

Some days, chronic illness feels less like “being sick” and more like living with a body that runs on an invisible, shifting budget. Not money, it obviously runs on energy. It’s the kind you can’t see, can’t measure with a neat little chart, and the kind you can’t predict with any real accuracy. You wake up and you don’t know how much you’ve been given to use that day. You don’t know if you have enough for a shower and a phone call, or if making breakfast will be the thing that tips the whole day into a downward spiral. The worst part is that you still have to plan as if you do know. You still have to make decisions like a responsible adult, while your body is out here spinning a roulette wheel behind your back.

People love to talk about “listening to your body” as if it’s a calm, mindful practice. Like you simply pause, take a breath, and receive a gentle message from within. My body doesn’t send gentle messages. It sends consequences. Chronic illness teaches you the hard way that you can’t spend what you don’t have and if you do and you push too hard, carry too much, say yes one too many times, your body ends up collecting interest. It collects in pain, in fatigue, and in symptoms that don’t just inconvenience you but derail you. A flare isn’t a bad day. It’s a takeover. It’s your body staging a coup and reminding you who actually runs this life. Newsflash, it’s not my mind or my will. I would be an archaeologist if it were up to me and not my disabled body.

So you become strategic. You become cautious. You learn how to live like you’re always one wrong choice away from collapsing into a heap. You pace. You ration. You rest before you’re tired because if you wait until you’re tired, it’s way past too late. You don’t just manage your time; you manage your threshold. You learn that “productive” isn’t a goal, but a risk assessment. Then you mourn because there are things you gave up that don’t come back.

I gave up finishing college. I gave up the version of my life where I could map out a future and trust that my body would simply… come with me. I gave up my dream of being an archaeologist and getting to dig through history with my hands and my curiosity and doing work that felt like a calling. I gave up the fantasy of being self-reliant in the way people romanticize it: independent, unshakeable, and capable in all the ways the world rewards.

I didn’t give those things up because I didn’t want them enough. I gave them up because wanting doesn’t cure anything. That’s the part no one tells you: chronic illness doesn’t just steal energy. It steals options. It steals ease. It steals the casual confidence of making plans without calculating the cost. It steals identities you haven’t even grown into yet.

The grief is deep, and it is complicated because you’re still here. You are still trying, but trying doesn’t always look like triumph from the outside. From the outside, chronic illness can look like inconsistency. Like flakiness. Like “she was fine yesterday.” Like “she doesn’t do much.” Like “must be nice to stay home.” They think it’s a life they can assess by peeking through a tiny window and making up the rest of the story

And GOD, are people obsessed with productivity! We live in a world that treats output like proof of worth. If you’re busy, you’re valuable. If you’re tired, you’re lazy. If you can’t keep up, you’re not trying hard enough. If you need accommodations, you’re an inconvenience. If you rest, you’re “giving up”. So, you learn quickly that you’ll be judged by what you can produce and by how much you can do, how well you can perform as “normal,” and how often you can show up without your body betraying you. You learn that your pain won’t count unless it’s visible and in a way that makes other people comfortable.

And if your disability is internal? If it’s chronic pain, autoimmune chaos, neurological nonsense, fatigue that doesn’t go away, plus organs and joints and nerves doing their own haunted little tango? Then you get the special bonus game: proving it.

People don’t believe you if they can’t see it. As if the only real suffering is the kind that looks good in a PSA. As if the body is not, famously, made mostly of things you can’t observe from across the room. Shocker: most of our body is on the inside. But disbelief is not neutral. Being denied that belief is harmful. It is harmful because it turns your life into a courtroom where you’re always presenting evidence. You’re constantly trying to translate something complex into something simple enough for someone else to validate. You’re constantly explaining your limits like they’re negotiable. You’re constantly trying to get people to understand that no, you can’t “just push through,” because pushing through is exactly how you end up in that downward spiral you’ve spent years learning to avoid.

And it takes a mental and physical toll. It takes energy to advocate for yourself. It takes energy to defend yourself. It takes energy to be misunderstood and still try again. It takes energy to swallow the humiliation of having to justify rest. It takes energy to be kind about it when you want to scream.

So, you end up doing this exhausting math:

· If I go, will I crash tomorrow? · If I say yes, what will I have to say no to later? · If I do the dishes, will I lose my ability to shower? · If I work today, will I pay for it for three days? · If I rest now, will people think I’m lazy? · If I don’t rest, will my body punish me?

This is the part people miss: chronic illness is not just symptoms. It’s a constant calculation. It’s living like you’re always budgeting for survival while everyone else assumes you’re being dramatic about a simple expense. Plus, you’re still expected to be inspiring. Grateful. Positive. Palatable. You are expected to make it make sense for other people. Meanwhile, you’re grieving the life you thought you’d have. You’re grieving the person you thought you’d be. The student. The archaeologist. The self-reliant version of you who didn’t have to build her entire existence around symptom management.

You’re grieving spontaneity. You’re grieving the ability to be taken at your word and you’re doing it while still showing up and still pushing the boundaries of what you’re physically capable of. This and still trying to build a life inside a body that keeps shifting the rules. Somehow, even that isn’t enough for some people because when your worth is measured by productivity, you can never “win” when your body is unpredictable. You can hit the wall, and someone will still ask why you didn’t climb it. You can accomplish something huge and someone will still notice what you didn’t do. You can survive a week that nearly broke you and someone will still call it “not doing much.”

So let me say this plainly, for anyone living inside this reality: If you are chronically ill, you are not lazy. You are not unreliable. You are not exaggerating. You are not failing because your life looks different.

You are adapting.

You are managing a body that requires more from you than most people will ever understand. You are making daily decisions that are not about preference but about preventing more than just exhaustion. You are sacrificing things people take for granted. You are carrying grief while being asked to act like it’s absolutely nothing. You are doing the work of staying alive in a world that only applauds visible effort. If you’ve given up dreams, if you’ve changed paths, if you’ve had to let go of a version of yourself you loved, none of that makes you less.

It makes you someone who has had to become inventive about survival. It makes you someone who has had to build meaning from the wreck. It makes you someone who deserves belief without a presentation. Because the truth is: the hardest part of chronic illness is not always the pain.

I’m gutted by how many people I’ve watched turn disability into a punchline and how easily they mock the tools we use to move through a world that wasn’t built for us.

If you don’t need something, that doesn’t make it “lazy”. It makes you lucky.

If you don’t see the point in it, that doesn’t make it pointless. It means you’ve never had to fight for basic access like it’s a privilege you have to earn.

And now? Now they want to erase us. Erase our resources. Erase the very things that let us function in society because apparently it’s “woke” to help people. Like giving disabled people equal footing is some trendy moral offense. Like compassion is a sin and accessibility is a joke.

That’s not just sad. It’s DISGUSTING.

And the way people are trying to strip the disabled of the resources that let us get even close to “normal”? It’s not ignorance anymore. It’s erasure even when it’s quiet, calculated, and dressed up as “an opinion.” They want us smaller. Invisible. Manageable. Gone.

Listen: disability isn’t a moral failure. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not something you can bully out of a body.

So hear me clearly: I’m done playing polite about this. I’m done swallowing rage so other people can stay comfortable. The next person who spits something cruel about disability… or mocks the tools that keep us alive and upright and present, should expect to be met. Not with silence. Not with a forced little smile. With more than just my voice, even if it’s sharp enough to leave a mark. And more than the truth, even when it doesn’t flinch.

And if you think this will never be you, you’re gambling with a future that doesn’t care about your confidence. It just takes one. One accident. One diagnosis. One virus. One bad day that for some reason doesn’t seem to end. And suddenly you’re the one reaching for the very tools you used to sneer at… just to find out they’re gone.

Being twisted apart, slowly yet swiftly

Each one teasing me, agitating my soul

Hyperactive.

Energy flows through my bloodstream, erratically

Jumping off my insides like

an adult in a Bouncy Castle

Destroying it with each pulse.

By Kelly Lynn Curry

It is my sanctuary

I fight the agony, constant in its design

Adoring the ever-beating heart

Every breath is a reminder

I am at war

That I exist in two realities:

Pain and Pleasure

— Kelly Lynn Curry

—Kelly Lynn Curry

— Kelly Lynn Curry

My brain is overloaded

In need of a imaginary lobotomy

Scalpel

Let the anesthesia flow through me

Damn, I opened my eyes.

— Kelly Lynn Curry

creeping into the bedroom,

crawling onto the sheets,

Illuminates with each passing second

Calm and slow,

reaching for my body to envelope my soul

To comfort me with its warmth.

— Kelly Lynn Curry