Today was tough. I felt overwhelmed. I’m trying to manage an autoimmune disease and four proposals at once. I itched more than usual this week. My hair has started to quickly thin. My rashes flared up. To top it off, dumbass drivers clogged Phoenix roads with accidents, turning a 20-minute drive into a 45-minute commute.

For the first time since being diagnosed, I wanted to give up. I didn’t want my life to be going from doctor to doctor, lab to lab, spending every penny I have on increasing insurance copays only for doctors to basically say the same thing week after week until the medications show results.

I’m collecting specialists like preteens collect Pokemon. At first, I thought this could be fun. Like a grueling sports practice, fun has turned into work.

In the past three weeks, I saw a dermatologist, two rheumatologists, and a psychologist. A radiologist reviewed my CT scan. Pathologists analyzed my blood. Thursday, I see my psychiatrist for my ADHD medications. I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist to monitor my retinas because of known side effects from hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil). Next week, I have an electromyograph (EMG) with a neurologist at Mayo Clinic.

I’m collecting medical specialists like preteens collect Pokemon. At first, I thought this could be fun. Like a grueling sports practice, fun has turned into work.

Turning despair into inspiration

I want more from life. I want friends and strangers to see me not as some guy who battles an incurable illness, but as me—a writer, a thinker, a proposal specialist, an amateur saucier, a wine connoisseur.

I try not to focus on the difficult parts of my life. I try to borrow strength from overcoming my past.

This evening, I channeled my negativity and hammered out almost a thousand words in my new novel, even if they were about my character’s obsessions with Russian vodka and marijuana politics, about him being stood up by a strip-club cocktail waitress.

Writers and artists teach us how to make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable even when they are not.

Writing is what I do. For over fifteen years, it’s what I’ve done when the future seems grim, especially when I feel down. Besides, inspiration has to come from somewhere.

As the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche comments in The Gay Science, art and artists, including writing and writers, teach us “how to make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for ourselves [even] when they are not.”