To Exist Is To Flare: Howl-Daze
The Holiday season can be stressful even at the best of times. For many of us, the holiday season also brings a swell of grief, isolation, anxiety, and depression. But ESPECIALLY for those of us who live with chronic illness.
Add in that one family member that you just know is going to tell you to do a yoga or snort some kale and is it any wonder that you just can’t with the holidays?
After Turkey Day and before the big nexus of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, come write, vent, get loved on, and feel seen and heard in the Holiday Edition of To Exist is To Flare.
Do something to take care of yourself this Holiday season (and tell that invalidating person to foot the bill, just kidding, but not really. We’ve all had enough of gaslighting from all directions—medical and work, too.)
To Exist is to Flare: Labor-Less with Ella deCastro Baron and Anya Pearson
December 7, 2025, 1-4pm PST/4-7pm EST
Gift yourself this time of solidarity (via creative writing) during the howl-daze. We know how expensive it is to be sick in this culture. Sliding scale—please don’t let cost keep you. You deserve this♥️
Western culture tries to teach us that illnesses have cures. We hunt for antidotes and fix-alls. Yet, those of us with chronic illnesses—in our bodies and minds—persist in the slog of hit-n-miss treatment and diagnoses in-between “flare-up” and “remission.” There’s the isolation.
There are. All. The. Costs.
We’re even gaslit by healthcare professionals when we self-advocate, judged by those who do not/cannot see our inconvenient, uncommon, or invisible illnesses. Our stories are messy, inflamed, transcendent, mundane, stunning.
How do we love our own sick bodies and minds when so often, we are not loved well?
We need to decolonize the industrial, capitalistic, ableist reactions to the liminalities of sickness, suffering, treatment and wellness to love our true selves better.
This virtual “sick bay” is for chronically ill people of mind and body. Together, we will resist band-aid, results-driven ways of loving ourselves. We will:
*ponder and play through somatic portals
*practice sick-informed “love languages” beyond ‘toxic positivity’ (e.g. dispense laughter, tears, and tender touch as medicine)
*honor the divergent, brilliant ways our sick bodies and minds hold and tell story
*share and listen to our wonderings, woundings, and epiphanies. NOT medical advice!
In this same spirit, we encourage you to join the meeting however you can. We recognize that how we are able to ‘show up’ changes constantly, hour by hour. Come as you are. We got your back (unless it hurts too much to touch).
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Ella deCastro Baron
Ella deCastro Baron (she:siya:we) is a second generation Filipina American born and raised in Coastal Miwok territory (Vallejo, California). She is a VONA alum, holds an MFA, teaches Composition and Creative Writing at San Diego City College and U Mass, and co-facilitates "Where We Come From: Writing Your Ethnoautobiography" and "To Exist is to Flare: Loving Our Chronically Ill Minds and Bodies" through Corporeal Writing. Ella's first book of creative nonfiction is, Itchy, Brown Girl Seeks Employment, and she's published in Nonwhite and Woman, (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Epidemic, Anomaly, and The Rumpus. Her next book, Subos and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, will be published in 2023. As a woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, images, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling. She produces workshops and kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. She lives and loves on Kumeyaay territory (San Diego, CA) with her husband and interracial family. Her favorite pronoun is We.
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Anya Pearson
Anya Pearson (she/her/we) is an award-winning playwright, poet, screenwriter, producer, actress, and activist. A ‘21-22 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, she is currently finishing her debut collection of poetry, writing a novel, three pilots, a feature, launching a BIPOC-owned wearable activism clothing label, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better, more just world. Her plays include: THE MEASURE OF INNOCENCE (The Kilroys List, Drammy Award, Finalist: Oregon Book Award), MADE TO DANCE IN BURNING BUILDINGS (Showcase: Joe’s Pub, NYC; STT, Portland, OR), THE KILLING FIELDS (2018 Orphic Commission; Valdez Theatre Conference; Seven Devils New Play Foundry; Great Plains Theatre Conference), WITHOUT A FORMAL DECLARATION OF WAR (PCS Commission, Seven Devils, JAW, Great Plains), THREE LOVE SONGS (Play at Home Initiative, PCS). A spoonie. A survivor. A single mother. A body alive with multiple nexuses of marginalized identity and sediments of trauma, Anya is passionate about helping others find their voice through the transformational power of story.
Find her online www.anyapearson.com & www.urbanhaikuclothing.com
IG: @iamanyapearson & IG:urbanhaikuclothing