The Storm - Nysiztor Gallery 15th to 30th November 2025 - SICK AF Collective

 The Storm

Nysiztor Gallery 15th to 30th November 2025.

SICK AF Collective @sickaf.com.au

 

Sudden chronic illness feels as though your limp; sick and exhausted body has been swept up and swallowed by an enormous wave. That wave rips through your identity of self; all of the parts of yourself you've built or what you've instilled within yourself are now ruin; total debris. Your occupation, abilities, finances and future plans are fading off in the distance as you’re swept away further and further away from yourself.

 

Looking at myself in the mirror is a distorted image through fogged glass, I don't see myself anymore a stranger in the reflection; if I ever look that is. It's subtle the grey hairs growing and giving up on colouring my hair because the fatigue is too immense, not remembering the last time I put on makeup or plucked my eye brows because it's the least of my worries, to a dresser full of clothes yet track suits are worn; clothing I wouldn't have been caught dead in prior to illness. All of these things no matter how big or little when they slowly chip and fall away you seem to lose more parts of your identity and sometimes you wonder is there anything left of me at all? If I ask myself the question, who am I? I don't know, previously I would have been able to answer that question, now I cannot.

 

I thought how cruel as I sunk deeper and deeper into the conditions and symptoms and the emotions that came with it. I sunk lower and lower almost as though I was somehow below the sea bed, I couldn't possibly get any lower. It took everything away from me, even conversations with my children and partner were sparse because my ability to do so was impaired; it was lonely.

 

There was no life raft, doctors couldn't give me a fix all medication or even a clear pathway of getting back to my old self. FND seems to be for a topic for debate amongst clinicians so it shouldn't shock you that there is no procedure or policy in regard to a new diagnosis, a website is mentioned or in my case I was told if I just got on my old medications I'd be back to normal. I was so hopeful within the first years believing if I tried hard enough I would get better; it set in randomly one day that these conditions were life long and remission wasn't for myself.

 

'My hubris was believing remission would become reality.'

 

When I reflect back on my life I can see how this storm wasn't new, I have felt it many, many times before but within a different climate, a different seabed.

 

Please understand I have never had a person to base my moral compass on, the adults within my life haven't been safe, well-adjusted people. My compass I've created and moulded myself in a fractured manner through my lived experiences.

 

I have never felt as though a lighthouse or a home is a beacon of hope and safety, I'm wary of my surroundings and others what feels like safety soon turns unsafe, home as a child wasn't a safe space. I have to remind myself every day that I am safe, a mantra born out of becoming ill.

 

I feel as though I have lived alone on a boat trying to figure out how to steer it with no knowledge of nautical life, I've felt like I've had no help, support or somebody protecting me, life was for myself to figure out alone.

 

I also feel that I've walked the plank many times the anxiety and fear have been a constant theme within my life, walking the plank being physically unable to swim; life feels as though it wasn't meant for me.

 

The familiarity of the storm walking the plank, falling below the sea level, feelings of drowning or my brain voting for its own mutiny against me, the raw truth is this isn't new; I was born into this. The only newness is that I have new waves that crash.

 

I've ridden many different waves before,

-The sexual, physical, emotional abused and neglected child wave.

-The disabled, prejudiced and discriminated against wave.

-The unhealthy relationship wave.

-The mental health and the all-encompassing and swallowing Cptsd wave.

 

Now I have added waves, the chronic illness wave and the psychosocial disability wave as a result of my conditions and experiences. These added waves have created a beast, chronic illness has seemed to have mixed all of these different waves and created an entire ocean; an ocean that lasts forever, it’s vast.

 

The brutality and enormity of the ocean of chronic illness feels way more intense intertwined with my past experiences, interwoven and interconnected at every crash and fall. Emotions are larger and feelings constantly demand to be felt like an undercurrent; nerve pain pulsates. The symptoms thrash your weak body around; smashing against rocks unable to get out of the current even when you scream and protest enough the ocean becomes more viscous. This ocean feels cruel, unpredictable and whilst familiar a totally different beast, just like the new conditions I live with both the storm and the wave both cannot be tamed.

 

However, I have forged something to battle these storms, my own anchor. An anchor as old as myself, I have crafted and built it on my own merits a tool that I have leaned into a lot after the crash of Chronic Illness.

 

I realised early on in life beauty and creativity can be made within these waves and storms either as an act of kindness and quiet refuge, a safe space and sanctuary for healing and a time for self-agency, mind organising and self-growth or as an act of rebellion towards the situations I find myself in; I oscillate between these states when I create. The only constant anchor within my life and experiences has been the act of art. Drawing and creating within storms, a tool of grounding and salvaging the self since early childhood a skill I have mastered through the decades of practice.

 

'My anchor is a piece of paper ever so light yet to me it holds so much weight.'

Sunken Souls, Hand Drawn/ Digitised, 2025.

' Sunken souls drift deep,

No life raft seen near in sight,

no choice; sink deeper.'

Haiku 2025.

The Lighthouse Tower, Hand Drawn/ Digitised, 2025.

'Truth in chaos shines,

a beacon of hope; a fake,

set to see again.'

Haiku 2025

Depths of Despair, Hand Drawn/ Digitised,2025.

'Unveil your shadows,
tentacles rise from the deep,
abysmal embrace.'

Haiku 2025.