A contemplation on hormonal birth control, patriarchy, and spirituality.

I spent seventeen years on hormonal birth control for endometriosis and the last five years off. Now, I am pondering a return to it, while waiting on a specialist for bowel endometriosis. This entry moves through that whole timeline: the Madonna-Whore complex, a Catholic upbringing, divine feminine energy, and disability justice, all circling one question.

What if listening to the body and utilizing medicine as a tool is the most spiritual thing we can do?

Content note: this episode includes me breaking down while recording and frank talk about chronic illness, pain, and graphic medical/GI symptoms.

Reflections on chronic illness, neurodivergence, and finding kinship across five centuries.

I sat down to tell you about Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century mystic who was chronically ill, almost certainly neurodivergent and queer, and someone the Church never knew what to do with. She wrote one of the most extraordinary maps of the interior life ever put on paper and she wrote it while sick, while under the Inquisition, while her body did things no one around her could explain.

I had the whole episode outlined and ready to go. And then my body wouldn't cooperate while recording. My brain turned to waterfalls, the words wouldn't come, and I fell apart trying to do the one thing I wanted so badly to do.

Somewhere in the middle of falling apart, Teresa reached back across five hundred years and caught me. She wrote it too: "It is a wonderful thing when a sick person finds another wounded with the same sickness. How great a consolation to find you are not alone."

This isn't the episode I planned or researched for. It's the one that actually happened. If you're sick, or tired, or lonely in it too, this one is for you.

Here's where to find me:

Substack: karlyphilips.substack.com

Website: karlyphilips.net

Instagram: @karlyphilips_

TikTok: @karlycontemplates

Content note: this episode discusses chronic illness, death, and mortality, including a moment of reflecting on times when being alive feels unbearable.

A contemplation on chronic illness, grief, and the longing to live.

At 36, I received emergency surgery for a heart block that required a pacemaker to keep my heart beating. Since then, I’ve been contemplating my own mortality and noticing myself becoming more and more fearful of my 40th birthday. My beloved aunt died of a rare form of cancer, appendix cancer, at 45. She was still becoming. She was finally allowing herself to daydream different possibilities for her life and within the same year, she was gone. This piece is a reflection on my fear of her story becoming my own and the grief that comes from realizing I’ve spent my life focused on the search for a cure for suffering, while not realizing how deeply I longed to really live.