you know mm-hmm yeah and there's like that's something that you and I have talked about outside of the camera a lot of now like chronic illness and how because I also have a chronic illness and it's it's tough there's like a lot of grief to it a lot of like I brought a book called loving our own bone yes and just like trying to figure out how to love a body that is like constantly trying to work against

yeah us yeah absolutely yeah that's been the story of my life trying to find that relationship with my body where I don't resent it, and I feel like through movement, I find my body, and very similarly through the writing, through language, I get more in touch with my body.

The body is all up and through the book.

And after my first surgery, which was in 2013, I was only 19 years old, I was on life support after that surgery, and a lot of these poems in this book were written from that time surviving something like that and some people don't like to hear this but it inspired me um yeah i of course we i don't want to suffer and illness and disability is a part of our lives and i find that there's a level of avoidance So many people are suffering, whether it's with chronic pain or chronic illness or whatever it may be.

And so it was important also for the title to be Towards What Hurt because I'm I've learned in my life, with my illness in particular, is what I resisted, persisted.

So what I avoided in my illness, whether that was not making a doctor's appointment, thinking the juice thing was gonna heal what was already, these avoidant things that I was doing, they were hurting me even more.

And so what does it look like to actually go towards the wound and go towards the thing that hurts? I grew up being told not to claim my illness.

There's got to be more.