Welcome. I am moving from disease into ease as I negotiate my recently diagnosed autoimmune vasculitis. My absence from blogging is explained by fact that I couldn’t do anything until I found some digital hacks for my health and to build my community connections. I write to overcome my fear as I transition into an independent scholar building a small web design, education-consulting, and database company while learning to live with chronic disease. In this post I share digital resources that I found while learning from illness and developing my new professional status. I want to connect with communities of Chicana feminists and other digital scholars of color to reduce the digital divide. 

During the Time-of-Pain, I was grateful for the Chicana feminist scholars who have hired me to create digital assignments, websites, and database tools. My independent scholar and designer identity is growing. While I am applying for database administration jobs, I’ don’t want to give up my Chicana feminist digital scholar identity. The chance to help others has kept me from sinking into a very dark place. 

Creativity and digital creative tools helped this middle-aged nerd reintegrate teaching and academics into a new reality. Creative growth requires accepting alternative perspectives. In my 20 years as a women’s studies and Chicanx studies professor at St Edward’s University, I used the tuition remission option to complete a computer science degree that I started at UC Berkeley; I also completed all but three classes for my MBA with a focus on digital marketing, and took classes in graphic design and bioinformatics. As a scientist and humanist, I continue to be awed about how much watercolor and art classes alter my view of learning. Watercolor painting and the creative approach of graphics design classes have been helpful as I navigate my illness and hack my life back into my own hands. 

Bathtub Virgen, watercolor by Lisa-Justine Hernandez  

Truth is that for almost a year, I have been stuck in denial. Since my November 2020 blog post, a doctor specialized in autoimmune illness ended my three months of daily, constant pain and sleepless nights. First I avoided my sadness about no longer having the title of associate professor and the stability of tenure—20 years and now…nothing.  Add to that learning that I no longer have perfect health. Despite months of pain, I wanted to avoid the idea because fear is a mind-killer. Until the ER doctors admitted me to the hospital for one night, I had never been seriously ill.  Although my illness is being managed, I lost months of focus. By sifting through LinkedIn Learning, I found online resources that I use to improve my focus for writing and building my digital design and education consulting company and to help me connect with Chicana feminist digital resource-experts.

I hope you find the tools helpful. They helped me set up a writing group check-in space and summon my own thought-dragon; I’ll explain more below in the Enter Spiritual Artistic CyberAztlán section 🙂

USEFUL TOOLS

• • Trello is a mobile and desktop platform/app
    Organized into separate Boards with Lists and Cards. The simple, free option works for me. Cards can have checklists. It organizes things I use to save to Google calendar (tasks, reminders, goals) and my office white board. P.s. I am digging my home office.

• • Evernote is a mobile and desktop platform/app
    I use the  web clipper to save info into notebooks that allow me to tag entries. It provides an easy search tool for links and info I previously would have saved to web browser bookmarks. This new perspective for organizing is easily searched unlike bookmarks. Again, the creative new perspective helps me reset my brain. Yes, I am a total gearhead.

• Binaural Beats Relaxation: Brain Waver (Binaural entrainment, a mobile app ):
  Placebo or not, the white noise helps. The idea is to listen to sound waves that match brain states I aspire to. I listen to alpha presets on headphones while I write while playing music in the background. I listen to the preset for sleeping to reach deep delta wave sleep, which I’ve been having trouble reaching since being ill. This app reset my mind to my new cyberAztlán life. For now, the app is a keeper.

Enter Spiritual Artistic CyberAztlán…Or Stop Reading Here If You Just Want the HACKS
I have developed creative ways to continue my work as a Chicana feminist digital scholar. Having refreshed my workflow with tech like Trello, Evernote, and Binaural Entrainment allowed me to shift into a new way of analyzing and making sense of my life. I restarted artistic and spiritual practices I had neglected for years. The Time-of-Pain helped me to accept fear and to surrender to change. While frustrating, the shift into seeing in new ways with creative and artistic tools has helped me understand that being still or in “the process” of transition isn’t being lazy. It is a chance to be in the now rather than focusing on external demands that are not in my best interest.

My autoimmune vasculitis and my rasquache aesthetic have reframed my connection to the work of Gloria Anzaldua. Her book Borderlands/ La frontera reminds me I have body, mind, and spirit. ‘Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul.’ To come back into myself I had to reconnect with my joys by making things for others. I painted a B-day card with watercolors and knitted a cap. I am comforted and find joy in the rituals I neglected because of associate professor tasks. 

Meditation has helped me face my anger of all the changes.  A week ago, my very own thought-dragon appeared to me during my Kunlun Nei Gung meditation, a practice I have ignored for years. My ‘thought-dragon’ eats my unwanted negative thoughts about the shit that life and people dump on me, which allows me to continue calm meditation while the dragon takes care of me. My thought dragon flies to the people who originated the unwanted negative thought and ‘blesses’ those people with dragon fertilizer, holy thought-shit. I feel safe and free to let go of negative thoughts with my thought-dragon on sentry. And the image makes me laugh instead of being angry or resentful. Maybe my dragon is Tlazolteotl who comes to help turn my pain and suffering into something beautiful. 

I also created a Writing Group BOARD to track my writing goals on Trello. By sharing a BOARD, I’ve started a writing group space where group members can share their hacks, goals, and accomplishments. Contact me if you want more information. 

Humility and confidence slowly peak from behind my fear; this is a new reality. Writing looms over me, and I fight writing even harder because it threatens to show me what I don’t want to see. It threatens to write my goals and dreams into being. I hope others can get lost in the process and discover their own life HACKS. Be creative, be intentional, be kind to yourself.