How Lyme Disease Stole a Decade —And What Came After with Diana Gordon

"I lost a decade of my life, but there was an afterwards. There are times when you don't know if yu're ever going to get out of this, but keep on… My life at the moment is the fruit of everything that's come before. So, keep the faith, keep trying." —Diana Gordon When your brain won't stop looping through everything that's wrong, distraction isn't avoidance — it's medicine. That's one of the hard-won truths poet and novelist Diana Gordon shares in this episode of Dear Body, I'm Listening, after spending a decade navigating undiagnosed Lyme disease, neurological sleep disruption, and the particular grief of the world going on without you. Diana opens up about five years of dismissed symptoms before finally finding effective treatment, what the loneliness of chronic illness actually feels like from the inside, and the one friend whose phone calls every three days proved more healing than any support group. She also shares the unexpected story of how reading her unpublished novels aloud to a bedridden friend — someone living with a severe, rare pain condition — not only mitigated that friend's pain in real time, but reignited Diana's own creative life. Three books are now coming out as a direct result. Diana reads two original poems live in this episode: "Letter from a Long Illness" — a meditation on the invisible solidarity between people sick in separate rooms, written to every person who doesn't know if they'll ever get out of it. "Medicine in Mystery" — sparked by a Chinese acupuncturist who diagnosed her with demonic possession and prescribed dragons. She also talks binaural beats, the medicinal power of Netflix, and why conversation — just ordinary, everyday conversation — may be the most underrated healing tool there is. Diana's poetry book Loosestrife for Porcupines is available now at dmgordon.com. Her Substack, Leaf Sheep, delivers short animal poems to your inbox — perfect for interrupting the loop on a hard day. Poem 1: "Letter from a Long Illness" If you have been to this land as I have been, where I am now, You will know the chill fog. Know that the fig tree, so far from light, will not fruit. Maybe you are here, even as I write. Maybe you haven't escaped. We can't see each other — alone in different sick rooms of the same country, borders closed, pinned motionless. We did not meet at the atrium. You didn't complain your jeans were tight and choose the Reuben. I didn't use a matchbook to study a table leg. We don't do simple things here, where minutes are broken, and we can't make plans. Though you can't see or hear me, I'm writing on the faith that saying it keeps possibility alive, that it might not be too late for either of us to hike the prairie and collect sand spurs on our socks, to drive ourselves into thunderstorms. Not too late to stroll down Madison Avenue, admiring shirts displayed on seas of opalescent buttons. We might yet pass each other on the boardwalk, you in your tight jeans, shopping artisan stalls, your little dog in a basket on your handlebars, waiting for the borders to open — on the faith that thinking it keeps possibility alive, I am hoping to meet you there. Poem 2: "Medicine in Mystery" I've come at last to the Chinese doctor — diagnosis: demonic possession, spirochetes unbound by tissue, blood, or bone. His cure: release the dragons — iridescent white to fight the unnamed, salmon-colored to attack the known. I imagine them with folded wings, small enough to swim in human cells, sent after demons equally ancient, equally small, wh0 show themselves in cytoplasm the way creatures in opaque ponds create concentric rings unseen, break the skin of the water, Then return to hide in the mud. The war proceeds between the winged and wingless, And as in all histories, the winner will write it. The winner will be deemed good, Though every demon, electric, toxic, feels it is a child of the universe. Yet isn't there something always wrong about invasion? something always noble about defense So, in the end, I stand on a lacquered bridge over swollen runoff, a churning pond behind — It's April, ice on all the edges, the air hurts wonderfully to breathe, the water foams white, the sky, late and high, is riddled with salmon-colored contrails. The last dragons leaving. Connect with Donna: Website: https://www.donnapiper.com/ LinkedIn:   / donnapiper   Instagram:   / thedonnapiper   Facebook:   / thedonnapiper   YouTube:    / @thedonnapiper   Resources: 📖 Loosestrife for Porcupines by DM Gordon 🤔Got a question for me? Every month, I do a listener coaching episode—and I'd love to hear from you! Send your questions, stories, or flare-up confessions to [email protected], and you just might hear your answer on the show. 💲Discount Get $20 off the Visible Wrist Band 2.0 Click the link: https://join.makevisible.com/73784699...