If you’re new around here, I am getting personal in this series of emails. I want to share more about how I ended up in this space as an artist, mom, advocate, and community support professional.  You can catch up on them here: one, two, three, four, and five.

Something pretty incredible happened during the summers I spent on Standing Rock. It was gradual, but I slowly started noticing symptoms that coincided with taking too much medication. By my senior year of high school, I had improved enough with disease management that I started applying to out of state colleges in California, Massachusetts, and Washington. 

Slowly, I decreased my dose little by little until I stopped taking medication altogether. During that time, I settled on attending Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. My pediatric neurologist helped set me up with a leading MG specialist in Los Angeles, and I saw him just before moving in to my dorm. When we stopped to see Dr. Engel on our way up to Santa Barbara, he told me with confidence that I was in remission. It felt like shedding an identity. I was free to be whoever I wanted and a version of myself I thought would never come to be. I also felt free to keep my health history a secret. When I did talk about MG, it was absolutely and always in the past tense. 

While art had always been there for me as I struggled to come to terms with a body that often felt more like a prison, I also felt like maybe I didn’t really need it how I used to. I entered college as a Sociology and English Lit double major. In high school, I had already completed an AP art class. While it was interesting, it didn't exactly whet my appetite for college-level art. If it had not been for a suitemate seeking a friend for a general education art class, I don’t know if I even would have taken the initiative to take an art class.

That spring, I sat down with my Principles of Design professor for a work review like he did with all of his students—art majors or not—everyone took 15 minutes to present their work in a one-on-one setting and discuss their strengths. That conversation pretty much changed everything for me (hi and thanks Scott if you are reading this). He asked me, “Alright Kait, what’s your major?”. When I replied that I was intending to study Sociology and English Lit his response was simply… no.

“No. You are an artist. You are an art major.”

I was flattered and maybe a little perturbed because I’m headstrong (read: stubborn). But that conversation got me thinking, and I became fascinated with the idea of trying to pursue a double major in Studio Art and Sociology. While I found a great deal of support and opportunity at Westmont, I felt unsettled. Towards the end of my first semester of college we experienced a serious wildfire that ravaged the school and surrounding area. The campus was under construction, I was taking classes out of mod buildings, and the school overall was in a period of transition. Towards the end of the spring semester, I requested a semester of consortium for that fall at an affiliated college in Massachusetts which I had applied to initially. When Westmont denied my application, I applied to transfer because I felt that strongly about needing a change. 

I told you, headstrong.

That summer, I worked diligently on my application to the art program at my new school. It was a bigger department and would give me the opportunity to study under an artist I greatly admired (and still do), Bruce Herman. I continued my trips to Standing Rock, and worked on more opportunities to weave art into my time there: camp activities, a painted mural, diving deeper into the history of art and artistry in the Lakota culture. It was exhilarating and terrifying to make this change. This time my health was a secret completely. My roommates didn’t know. I never set up with a specialist in the area. I discharged from pediatric care at DuPont because I had turned 18, and carried on with my new life on the North Shore.

Shortly after transferring, I applied to an intentional community honors program, The Elijah Project, centering on work and vocation. The program consisted two seminars with a summer internship in-between followed by a full school year of living in a house with your cohort. There were 16 of us who started our first seminar in the spring after I arrived. I was at a point in my studies where I was feeling overwhelmed with inaction. I loved the concept of Sociology, but was feeling stuck by how theoretical rather than practical the program was turning out to be. I continued to find myself in opportunities that got me thinking about teaching and I began the process to switch my major yet again to Secondary Education and Studio Art by the end of my sophomore year.

Before moving into an old farmhouse a half mile or so from campus the fall semester of my junior year, each of us completed summer internships that were to relate in some way to the idea of personal vocation we were exploring. I returned to Standing Rock as part of my internship with The Elijah Project not knowing it would be my last trip. I wanted to better understand how I could integrate my interest in art, service, and community. It was a physically and emotionally demanding summer. I left the reservation completely drained and in need of knee surgery after injuring it from overuse. I had surgery to repair a fissured patella and then left 3 days later to move back to school and into the Dexter House.

Immersed in the newness of being healthy and run down by the output of work, I ignored the warning signs that I might be pushing myself too far despite that nagging feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was doing too many things and expecting too much. I kept pushing and pushing until I one day that fall semester, I physically could not make my bed. 

Remission, if achieved at all, is almost always temporary. That was something I did not know.