feature image photo by Bryan Steffy / Contributor via Getty Images
Of course Andrea Gibson would leave us in the middle of Disability Pride Month.
It feels like one final shout into the world: I was here. I was chronically ill. I mattered — and you do, too.
The first time I heard Andrea Gibson’s work, my partner — at the time, someone I was just beginning to fall in love with, now my spouse — sent me a YouTube video while I was commuting to a soul-crushing job. The kind of job where the Director of Human Resources once looked me in the eye and said, “Jesus loves you regardless of your lifestyle choices,” and my ableist boss regularly complained that I missed too much work for medical appointments.
I spent a lot of time literally hiding in my office, praying no one would knock or need anything. Every time someone looked at me, I had to shove whole parts of myself — my illness, my queerness, my heart — into the dark recesses beneath my desk. Do not be queer. Do not be disabled. Do not be upset. Pretend you can keep up. Pretend you are like them.
The video was a performance of Andrea’s poem “Good Light.” I put in my earbuds and sat silently on the bus, letting the words wash over me:
“Got rid of my yes trying to make a no so big it could go back in time,
swallow everything that happened that should not have happened…
But then I met you and I started feeling myself open,
started feeling my yes coming back
and it was the sweetest thing I had ever known.”
At the time, I was fighting a confusing, escalating storm of symptoms. I was burning through sick days at a job that punished absence but gave no room for rest. The fatigue, the pain — it was often too much to even sit up in bed. And yet, the doctors I saw — some of the so-called best in the country — either shrugged or told me it was stress. No one believed me.
Then the algorithm delivered “Angels of the Get Through.” It felt like Andrea was sitting beside me talking directly to me:
“This year is the hardest of your whole life.
So hard you cannot see a future most days.
The pain is bigger than anything else.
Takes up the whole horizon no matter where you are.”
And I broke. I cried on the bus — publicly, messily, unavoidably — because I felt this poem understood me in some impossible way. So I did what anyone does when something cracks you open: I went down the inevitable internet rabbit hole. I searched for this Andrea Gibson person, hoping their work could help me make sense of myself.
What I found was someone who had lived with chronic Lyme disease, an illness the medical world still largely refuses to acknowledge. It’s one of several diagnoses akin to a modern day “hysteria” because so many doctors refuse to believe they exist and often tell patients that it’s in their head, like chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, endometriosis, long COVID, and fibromyalgia.
Andrea wasn’t alone in this. There’s a long and powerful queer lineage of artists whose bodies were politicized, pathologized, and misunderstood and who still chose to create from that place. Frida Kahlo painted her pain. Audre Lorde wrote fiercely about her body, her cancer, and her Blackness. Andrea belongs in that legacy: queer artists who insisted pain was worth documenting — not to be pitied, but to be witnessed.
I’ve been living on the spectrum of disability my entire life (and yes, disability is a spectrum, not a binary), but the medical system was too sexist and too siloed to believe me. Finding Andrea’s words — and more than that, their pain — felt like throwing open a window I didn’t know had been sealed shut. I wanted to collect every quote and scrawl across my life like a teenager with a MySpace page: Believe me. Understand me.
Andrea had a rare and radical ability: They could name the agony of chronic pain and illness without giving in to hopelessness. Their work lived in the unspoken reality of being sick, not in the media-friendly story of the disabled person who bravely “overcomes.” They wrote about the real middle, the tightrope where so many of us balance our lives. Where illness is grotesque, humiliating, boring, enraging, lonely, normal. They wrote the whole brutal truth we often work to hide, so we can be the good, palatable disabled people we’ve been taught to be. Their words pulled illness out of the shadows, gave it dimension, contradiction, and beauty. In “Gender in the Key of Lyme Disease”, they write:
“Good God.
There isn’t a healthy body in the world that is stronger
than a sick person’s spirit.”
This is not a Hallmark movie kind of hope but the gritty kind that drags itself out of bed even when your joints say no and your blood pressure isn’t interested in standing. They wrote about the fever that felt like freedom because it came with a name and an end, just the flu. They wrote about being carried, literally, on a tandem bike by their partner. About the self-doubt that sneaks in when you wonder if someone could possibly love you with your illness. Gibson didn’t make illness pretty. They made it real.
Their poem “An Insider’s Guide on How to Be Sick” is one of the clearest examples of that: a raw, defiant manual for surviving the unbearable, one appointment, one crash, one breath at a time:
“This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the night / This pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room / to another life… This not knowing what the test will say / This pray pray pray / This hospital bed / This fluorescent dark.”
That poem didn’t pity sick people; it simply believed us, and it raged with us. It refused to perform for the healthy. And most importantly, it didn’t create a false happy ending. It offered truce. Not a cure, not resolution, but survival as protest. Survival as song.
“On my most broken days
when my faith is a willow
and the pain has nothing but an ax to give,
the only thing I want more than to die
is to live.”
“That needle is the needle on a record player, Doctor.
Everything–and I mean everything–can learn how to sing.”
In the wake of their death, I’ve seen so many tributes calling Andrea’s fight with cancer “brave.” But that word — brave — flattens what Andrea spent their life resisting. They weren’t interested in sanitized heroism. They didn’t perform inspiration. They told the truth.
“A difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one.” – Andrea Gibson, “Every Time I Ever Said I Want To Die”
It’s not about overcoming illness; it’s about living alongside it, through it. Yet many remembrances and articles have focused on their gender and their cancer while glossing over how long they lived with invisible illness and disability. Chronic pain that cannot be conquered and tied up neatly with a cure and a bow doesn’t make good headlines in an ableist world, but it shaped Andrea’s life and their voice. To leave it out is to miss something essential.
It might seem inappropriate, even uncomfortable, to quote so many of their poems about death in the wake of their own. But Andrea never shied away from that discomfort. As they wrote in “Come See Me In the Good Light”: “Everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes.”
Because the truth is: Living with chronic, incurable illness often does feel like hovering at the edge of life and death. We lose friends and community members far too soon. We live with statistics — life expectancy, survival odds, complication rates — etched into our minds. We take medications with side effects that sound more terrifying than the illness itself. And we’re constantly reduced to numbers: heart rate, blood pressure, blood counts.
Andrea understood this. You’d be hard-pressed to find a poem of theirs that doesn’t mention death, and yet, in that ongoing conversation with mortality, Andrea showed us how to live.
Their poem “Tincture” was first shared with me as a work-in-progress at a live show. Andrea said they wrote it as a lifeline — for the days when the pain was so bad they wished they didn’t have a body at all. It ends with a stunning moment: the soul, newly freed from the body, is greeted by the stars. The stars, desperate to understand:
“I can’t imagine it,” the stars say.
“Tell us about pain.”
And I think: I hope, Andrea, that you’re at peace. I hope you’re out there somewhere, telling the stars about pain.
Because your pain made us feel less alone in ours. You showed us what it could mean to live with pain, not despite it. To be queer, sick, brilliant, messy, hopeful, and real.
Thank you.
O’Donnell, whose father’s family is Irish, moved to Ireland before inaguration. “I knew after reading Project 2025 that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my nonbinary child to leave the country,” she 
I’m so curious about Rebecca and Ryan mentioning Gabby and Marine. Was that something they were told those two wanted to come out and they could talk about? Are they two of them hanging out enough with players they they knew it and like Jonquel didn’t know it was a secret and just outed them?
my guess is that they thought they were being good straight allies by acknowledging a queer relationship on the broadcast without realizing that it wasn’t public information — i mean it seems to be widely known to the point where Marine’s teammate Jonquel Jones didn’t know it wasn’t public information, either?
Yeah I think that probably was it. Ryan was trying to name all the lesbians in the audience at one point.
Fascinating that this is where we have gotten to.
WNBA All-Star weekend has always been a Lesbian Holiday, and now the Stud Budz have given us a peek inside the parties. Don’t forget Court and T teasing DJ Diplo to pump up Angel’s party on Sunday night. And Court’s tagline for flirting with all the girls, “You smell good as F%&#!”
The Dallas Wings didn’t fly Azzi to the All Star Games. She and Renee were referring to the time she attended a Dallas game in Atlanta.
i am so beyond curious to know what’s going on with marina and saniya rivers!!! maybe they’re not gay for each other and maybe it’s just a case of marina really looking out for saniya after the recent death of her mom but i tbh think that we the people deserve for BOTH of these things to be true!
Also Courtney’s ~official~ WNBA TikTok clip about a common misconception about her being that she’s still in a relationship—and Phee’s shocked face—“Whaaaat? I’m in the field! Send the baddies!”