I was Fighting for Animal Liberation. Until My Own Freedom was Destroyed.
By: Cade B
June 14th, 2023 is the day that slowly ruined my life. Why?
Well, 2022 was a good year for me – I had a polycule with two beautiful partners, a dog meant to become my psychiatric service animal, was reunited with my core friend group at our undergrad college for the first time since lockdowns, and got through the first year of my master’s! I wanted to get serious about animal activism at the start of 2023, and seeing as I was involved with a group through grad school, this was a perfect time to. I’ve been vegan my whole life, practically (a privilege I never take for granted), but I started due to food allergies and sensitivities which is how my parents let me become plant-based. It wasn’t until my late teens that I paid more active attention to the environmental and animal welfare aspects. So, with a group of 15 incredible animal advocates I met while living in Colorado or on Zoom, I traveled to California in June to attend an animal rights conference. That was my first time being a part of something so magnificent, so massive beyond any single person there.
We had impactful lectures, rescues, marches, and canvassing sessions. I mingled with more animal lovers than I’d ever seen and known before. My heart felt like it grew 3 sizes and I wish I could go back to experience it all over again. However, what was supposed to be a reminiscent final day in the Airbnb on the morning of the 14th, was replaced with frantic hotel bookings, flight cancellations, frightened tears, and wondering what the hell I was about to deal with. At the conclusion of 3 rapid tests in a row, T line growing dark within seconds, all I could think was “F*CK”. I thought the previous night feeling exhausted and achy was from an all-nighter filled with up-close rescues and huge public demonstrations. I also thought the tests were just broken and expired. Alas…
June 15th, 2023. On this day, I was supposed to fly out to my long-distance partner at the time who also lived in California. Our visit was meant to be a convenient tack-on to the adventure I was already on; one that we clearly looked forward to. My hotel isolation lasted for 10 extra days. Not fun, obviously. Everything sounded “flat” to me as a musician, my legs still ached, and I had some coughing and an elevated heartrate. So it was “mild”. I did watch an ungodly amount of Real Housewives of Orange County on the TV, and added more hours to my ridiculous Animal Crossing playtime. So at least I did something. The dishwasher kept beeping for the first 1.5 days, until I figured out that it was in the middle of a forgotten wash cycle before I even got into the room, apparently. Water still pooled in it! Delightful. I also had the luxury of paying over $800 for inhalers because I was out of state. Yay. At least I only dealt with mild wheezing. My LDR visit was cut short by a few days, but I was just relieved to be in my love’s arms after so long. *One of the last times I’d be able to.*
A month later. My legs still tingled with an insatiable numbness. Deep tremors. Walking sucked. But the first neurologist blamed it on my veganism (cue excessive eye roll), and sent me to bloodwork without much else. No, my B12 and such was fine, thank YOU very much. Made possible by the hysterectomy a few years prior. But the weird feelings grew over the next few months to where these “attacks” would happen and I’d be almost unable to hold cups because the weakness and tingling spread to my arms, and later my face. I also kept dropping and flinging stuff unprompted. A second neurologist in December did an MRI and found one or two lesions, which he said could’ve been literally anything. I had to feign a semi-intrigued-sounding “Oh! Interesting,” to conceal the alarm bells blaring across my nervous system. How am I supposed to cope with the realization that the sheaths around my nerves are disintegrating, based on the report? Demyelination? Am I supposed to just be okay with that? I STILL can’t cope with it.
This is where the last remaining pieces of any secure foundation crumbled to dust.
January 1st or 2nd, 2024. Happy New Year! You get flashing lights and blind spots. Spots that last for 1-10 seconds with no stimulus. Obviously the neuro-ophthalmologist the next month found nothing, what did you think this was, a problem rooted in reality?? I refused to believe I was genuinely “just seeing things” so that train led to 3 more panic-filled eye appointments that dragged into 2025. But during all that, I was christened with the honorable status of Long Covid on July 10, 2024 by a third neurologist. Forever baptized in the font of bullsh*t with my head being held down; I am not coming back from this. At least this one masked in the appointment and complimented the very gay shirt that I wore that day.
It would seem that the Long Covid was a manifestation of The Tower card in tarot; lightning strikes zapping my soul, ushering in disasters that would have the gods cowering in fear. The 10 or so medical conditions I already had were scared to look Long Covid in the face. And the visual nonsense was just Act One…
I slowly disappeared from my vegan activism circles as the meetups and potlucks became too much for my energy levels, and I was still the only masked person there in the end.
A hematologist couldn’t decide whether I had the beginnings of MGUS or not, which wasn’t encouraging considering the wildly spiking IgM amounts, development of “light chains” in my blood, and family history of multiple myeloma.
An abrupt breakup with my LDR partner weeks after a long visit with months of codependent uncertainty and false hope afterwards. We were planning to live together and I couldn’t find covid-safe housing in time before ending my lease, so I was forced to move back in with family amidst their move to Texas in August. Only one of the worst states ever.
My fingernails became brittle near the end of the year as dark, vertical lines began creeping in. The fingers themselves lost the ability to open packages without a painful struggle, even the “easy-open” stuff. Apparently my attention-seeking liver was having a temporary freakout, but I’d come to see that the lines and brittleness lingered.
A potential ovarian cyst OR cysts (the ultrasound and MRI disagreed) and a right ovary enlargement made me almost regret keeping them.
2025 came along and Long Covid still wasn’t finished with me. 4 scintillating scotoma-preceded ocular migraines in January, April, May, and November after going over a decade without one. I lost my remote job because I wouldn’t move back to Colorado in 30 days. Not like I had the energy to go back to a hybrid schedule anyway. I was too busy being ping-ponged back and forth from test to scan, office to office, 30 minutes away, 2 hours away. IVs, needles, infusions, x-rays, MRI bores with cadences and chords that I’ve memorized by now… every time I return to that claustrophobic donut I create new compositions in my head. My vision started to look like transparent TV static. I got numbness and weakness episodes again. I noticed that my “S” versus “TH” speech problem was re-emerging, which had been mostly nonexistent since elementary school. My legs felt like lead whenever I came back from my weekend job and showered. The ADHD scatterbrain that was once somewhat motivating became debilitating. Common words began to flee from my mind. As someone who used to study vocab for fun as a kid, and has been a creative writer since middle school? Devastating. I found at least one tender lump in my chest. Several others appeared elsewhere while bruises kept popping up that I knew weren’t from clumsiness. But who cares, right? The visual flashes and blind spots and “lightning” and stars kept growing in number but the number of reasons stayed exactly the same: none. From the spring, I was unexpectedly falling asleep minutes after dinner, or waking up at midnight to see that I HADN’T had dinner yet, face planted on the desk. I had sleep paralysis once in 2024 and a waking hallucination earlier in 2025. Neither had ever happened before. Turns out it was Narcolepsy type 2 without cataplexy casually rearing its ugly head. I was diagnosed in October, and it’s felt like a never-ending waterfall that I’m not allowed to swim out of. That has been one of the most frustrating parts. My brain screams as it shuts down, unable to control its own sleep-wake cycles. Again, am I supposed to be delighted about the nonconsensual neuroinflammation that spawned this demon? But of course nobody consents to that. My normal night owl tendencies got completely wiped. I am either falling asleep upright, on top of my covers from 12am-2am and waking up at roughly 6-7am pissed off–no night routine to speak of–or I stay awake and regret it for real this time.
2026. Blood test results are still climbing into horrifying territories. Every few weeks my hands and wrists suddenly decide to burn, crack, bleed, peel, and turn into leather while I desperately waste my precious lotion and bandages. Rashes galore. I have an ever-growing mass or bump of some sort under my right arm that stretches from my ribs around to my mid-back. Sometimes it hurts. Could be my liver and/or gallbladder whining again. The possibilities worry me so I don’t think about it. The visual snow still seeks to rob me of one of the only joys that remain: stargazing. Many of the flashes and dark/blind spots have grown larger and can stick around for 30 seconds to a few minutes, freaking me out into thinking another ocular migraine is coming, before they finally fade. Teasing me, as if that’s funny. My deteriorating finger coordination wants to stop me from doing yet another passion, the activity I have two entire degrees in and have been doing since age 3: piano.
What and who else can I be? Like so many fellow spoonies, I no longer feel like myself. Whatever tiny bit of frustration tolerance and emotional regulation I had left with the unmedicated unholy combination of autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and C-PTSD is gone. My now-diagnosed OCD has exploded since 2020, worsened further in 2025, and let me just tell you: being germaphobic in a pandemic is exactly the special hell it appears to be. The outbursts I had as a teen came sprinting back, punching through the drywall keeping them out that was built by years of therapy. And so did the endless shame and emptiness that partners with them. It seems like my entire personality got rewired for the worse. And I can’t help but wonder if I will ever stop feeling like a monster.
Where am I now, if not in a black hole from which not even light can escape? As I write this, as another Long Covid Awareness Month is upon us, I am grimly reminded of how little this world truly cares. I have been wearing an N95 of some sort in the common spaces of my own dwellings for over 2 years. People SEE how damaged I’ve become, yet they won’t mask? Or even do any sort of nasal spray, throat spray, or god forbid social distance like they used to wherever possible? They “like” my posts, support my advocacy, call themselves a friend, but don’t make a meaningful change once they remove me from their consciousness again? They are saying the quiet part out loud. Yelling it, really.
This is not where I wanted to be in my late 20’s. Whatever I did so wrong to the Universe for it to do this for me, I promise I’ll be better in my next life. Please don’t reincarnate me back here like this, though. I miss being loved, I miss in-person friendships, I miss walks where I can breathe in the wind, and I miss feeling like I had a future.
I just want to be liberated.
Published: March 2026
