#a note

by Wislawa Szymborksa tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on sand, rise on wings;

to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes;

An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off;

and if only once to stumble on a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

Most of what I know about the criminalization of birthing people with substance abuse disorders comes from the incredible scholarship of Khiara Bridges, a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. Once again, women of color continue to do the cutting-edge work to create awareness for overlooked societal problems affecting the most vulnerable of our communities. And this is despite how these women are treated in institutions of higher education. It was an honor to read her work.

If you want to check out the article that exposed me to the ideas and sources I used in the microfic, it is available to the public here. It's in the Harvard Law Review, so it's academic and lengthy. However, I found it pretty accessible. Pages 793-797 are going to contain the context specifically related to the criminalization of pregnant opioid users.

i wanted to do a little exercise: send me numbers between 1 and 538 and i'll draw the corresponding oc and tell you something about them!! i have to dedicate time to other projects still but i really want to see them (some of them after a very long time) and i've always wanted to do it like this. sooooo... pwease? flutters my eyelashes at you?

i can guarantee this will be fun because i've been meeting my children since 3rd grade.

hope you're doing as well as you can.

It feels-- nice, relieving, and admittedly a bit sad.

Working with @obsessionoftheday to create and co-run this event was a true pleasure. Narrowing down the prompt lists together was my favorite part. I loved ensuring we had prompts that catered to all kinds of fandoms. Answering prompt clarification questions and suggesting creative ways to interpret the prompts was a huge highlight for me. Watching the collection numbers grow and reading all the tags on the various Sicktember posts will be things I miss deeply.

What I won't miss is the hectic scramble that follows the prompt selection process—the mad dash to double-check our choices to ensure none of the prompts are too similar to one another, comparing the new list with past ones to avoid repeats, and quickly updating the graphic for posting by the promised date. We may have stumbled a bit with the text prompts matching the graphic this year, but we made it work despite our busy lives. I consider that a win!

I also won’t miss the guilt that came from not checking the inbox often enough, not responding to asks quickly enough, or failing to meet everyone’s expectations.

And I certainly will not miss, the occasional negative, passive-aggressive, and downright angry interactions we've been subjected to over the years. Those were especially hard because my General Anxiety Disorder makes confrontations like those, particularly distressing. But if running this event has taught me anything, it's how to prioritize my mental health by minimizing conversations with difficult individuals. Even if there is so much I want to say! Knowing when to back off is a skill I can admit took me longer to learn than I’d like.

All of that being said, creating and co-managing Sicktember has been an incredible learning experience that connected me with a amazing community of writers. It has inspired my own writing and sparked so many creative ideas.

If my life weren't so chaotic, stressful, and overwhelmingly busy, I would have loved to continue moderating the event. However, I have complete faith that @itsmechara426 will guide Sicktember in a positive direction.