Tour Our Affirming Resources Database

a screenshot of the affirming resources database, organized by resource category, mocked up on a laptop.

We have a big announcement to make! We have a new business partner, and their name is Chronic Illness.

We’ve both been dealing with working while chronically ill since we launched in 2017, but our illnesses have always been the co-worker we tried to ignore. We’d make small talk by the water cooler, sure, if we had to, but we certainly didn’t give calendar access to them.

(It was a bit of a toxic relationship.)

For better or for worse, we’ve come to a point where our symptoms and their impact on our daily capacity just can’t be ignored or downplayed anymore. So instead of doing that, we’re trying something new: giving our chronic illnesses a desk and a title bump. They’re in the show now, giving input and leading projects.

That’s how we got our Chronic Illness Dashboard, which came about because I was trying to design a symptom tracker (paper) journal for myself so I could start to make sense of my triggers and get serious about my care. Only, while I was designing it, I just kept feeling like I wanted it both to be way easier to keep up with (I’m already on my phone or computer every day, and I don’t want to add anything unnecessary to schlep around in my chronic-pain-around-the-house-bag*) aaannd way more robust in the various ways I could refer to what I was logging. Not to mention typing is much less aggravating for my hand pain than writing is!

Turns out listening to how my symptoms impacted me and adjusting the project from there actually made it better.

Because from there, I realized I wanted more from the dashboard–I wanted help remembering what makes me feel better when I’m in the middle of a flare up and can’t think for the pain, or for when my brain fog takes over and I can’t remember that simply changing my clothes can help me.

Part of the dashboard that you can grab for free is a database of affirming resources that houses recommendations for books, substacks, websites, podcasts, instagram accounts, and a couple apps that have been useful and affirming for me.Right now it’s just a Notion template, but my dream is for it to help me facilitate a supportive community for chronically ill folks where we can all exchange resource recommendations, pain relief tools we find, and basically just show up for one another. In pursuit of this goal, I’m planning to continue to send out new resources as I find and connect with them to anyone who grabs the database–and I hope to hear what others add to theirs, so we can all build a more supportive resource library together. ☺️

*anyone else have one of these?

take a tour of our affirming resource database:

• transcript:

  All right, in this video, we're going to go over the Affirming Resources page, which I did mention in the I believe the self care, yes, the self care options, with the opening and closing duties. Excuse me, if you click into the affirming resources, there's a board view which takes up a little less space left to right. They're all grouped by the category of the resource. They're things that I've found helpful or like affirming in my own care. These three are books. This one is about keeping up with housework and chores. It's it's great. I've, I've read it once, but I've referred to it probably like 20 times since reading it. I only just read it a couple months ago, and I've implemented a lot of the the thinking and it's it's great for folks with chronic illness or disability.

  If you're looking to be a little more large scale. This, the book Care Work is about disability justice and community building things like that. And the book How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy. It is not specific to chronic illness or chronic pain or disability, but I do think that we live in a world that really prioritizes hustle culture, and that's really exploited by what I believe the author's name is Jenny Odell, refers to as the attention economy, and how that's all linked to self worth. And I think that that is something that's really exacerbated for chronically ill people and disabled people, and separating our value from our productivity is sort of key in managing our own self care and self worth, and so I highly recommend it.

  All of these links are bookshop links. So it will the sale will, part of the proceeds will go to one of our favorite local bookstores, which you can see here. But if you want to find your own local bookstore, you can click choose a bookstore here. We love Archivist Books. They have a pantry for the community. They're right down the road from us. They have a mutual aid closet, affordable secondhand clothes, a used book section, and they have all these, like, amazing queer books, zines, etc. So that's why we chose them.

  Another category is Instagram. These are various Instagram accounts, physical therapists, holistic dietitians, things like that, non, non-diet dietitians, body positive, fat positive, inclusive, things like that. But people who specialize in various chronic illnesses or managing symptoms that we've found helpful. The podcast Struggle Care is hosted by the same person who wrote How to Keep House While Drowning. I've only listened to a couple episodes of it, but I've really connected with the ones that I have listened to. I haven't listened to anything by the PCOS collective. I know my sister follows them, so I'm I think she has, but it looked like they had a lot of content about navigating life with PCOS.

  These websites are just various resource websites Cripping Up Sex focuses on sex and accessibility, like desire and disability, and then PCOS resources. That's just a screenshot of part of the page. They have a lot of different categories. A couple substacks I recommend. What to cook when you don't feel like cooking, the title kind of says it all. It's meant to be like easy, achievable meals for people who are maybe like not caring about being super chefs. And then soft hobbies is also not specific to chronic illness or disability, but I really like the writer's approach to just being gentle with themselves about engaging in their hobbies, and I find it inspiring and hope it makes me I, you know, because of the fatigue, I don't always do it, but it does make me want to dive into my hobbies more. So I keep reading and keep waiting for that inspiration and energy to align.

  Just a couple apps. Toilet Finder app is great. I use it every time I travel. It's to help you find the nearest public bathroom. Because, especially traveling to big cities, it can be like, where the fuck am I allowed to pee without buying something, and that can be really hard for people with chronic illness and disability. And then round app is it helps me take my daily medications. It'll give a window. You'll select a window of when you want to take a medicine, and it'll send you a few different reminder alarms throughout that window over the course of like a couple hours. So it's like, remember you want to take your meds soon. Remember to take your meds. Hey, have you taken your meds? And for a little while, I was also using it to remind me to eat regular meals, because it would be like, Hey, have you taken your medication "lunch" yet? You know, because I couldn't, I haven't been able to find an app that is not about diet planning, that's just for meal reminders. But I do find that when my symptoms are really bad, because I'm just laying down on the couch trying to manage the pain, remembering to eat can be really hard. So that's, that's a hack I've found here.

  If we find new resources, we'll we'll email them out. You can, just like in the other charts, if you have a new one here, you can add it in like that. There's also the gallery view of it, which is more downward scrolling of it, but it doesn't. It just depends on what you like visually. But that's it for this page!