Community Spotlight: Ashleigh

By chronicillnesshotlineUncategorized
My name is Ashleigh. I’m a small business owner, an independent artist, and a Lyme survivor.
 
My business is CharmCat Creative, and I make pretty paper things for pretty funny people™! I’m a watercolor artist, and all of my products feature art that I’ve created. My style is bold and colorful, and my greeting cards feature silly, sarcastic, and self-affirming sentiments.
 

I started out as a wedding invitation designer but grew from there! When I got the idea to start a wedding invitation business on the side, I was working a corporate job as a design assistant. After having done my own invites, an acquaintance asked me to do hers, and because I’d loved it so much the first time, I jumped at the opportunity to stretch my creativity.

Shortly after, I started a little Etsy shop with a handful of designs. CharmCat has grown and changed since then, ruled by a love of watercolor painting and all things paper.

I branched out from weddings and launched my everyday stationery line in 2018. Now, in addition to greeting cards and art prints, I have gift tags, buttons, stickers, and I’m developing even more designs and products while stuck in quarantine.

While my switch from the corporate world was partly due to an overall unhappiness with corporate office life, it was also fueled by a desire to find something to do with my life that worked with, and not against my body.

I was bit by a tick sometime in my sixth year of life. We don’t know exactly when. The news of Lyme disease, which was first recorded in Connecticut in 1975, hadn’t quite reached the average doctor yet. According to my medical records, I was treated for a rash and flu-like symptoms, and then when I had ongoing swelling and joint pain, tested for things like knee injuries and junior rheumatoid arthritis. When my GP ran out of ideas, he referred me to a specialist in child rheumatology. That was when I was finally tested for Lyme, months after the first infection. By then, as doctors now know, is too late to treat the infection.
 
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about chronic Lyme (known by the CDC as post-treatment Lyme syndrome), but when Lyme goes untreated it gets into all the parts of your body and affects lots of things. There’s a connection between Lyme and mental health disorders, sleep disorders, heart problems, lowered immune system, chronic joint pain, and so much more. Different people experience different symptoms with Lyme and it doesn’t always present the same way.
 
My chronic Lyme involves mental health struggles, UARS (requiring a CPAP machine), circadian rhythm disorder, joint pain, spinal problems, increased sensitivity to pain, degenerative joints, and chronic migraines.
 
So you can see how working a 9-5 was a struggle for me. Getting up early, working “normal” hours, and dealing with office politics were not easy for me.
 
Honestly, I felt inadequate. Like I was just being lazy, and if no one else seemed to struggle, then I didn’t have a right to struggle, either.
 
That’s a feeling I’ve had my whole life. I assumed that all the other kids in high school had back pain, too. That my struggles to wake up early, despite desperately wanting to be able to, were just because I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe it was because I got sick at such a young age, but I always struggled with owing up to my pain, because I didn’t want to be seen as a complainer. I thought my experience was normal, and I was just weak.
 
It wasn’t until I started therapy in college that I realized there might be something real wrong with me. I didn’t get up the courage to tell my doctor until I graduated. 
 
It was so gratifying to find that I wasn’t imagining things. There was real stuff going on in my body that wasn’t normal. And I finally started getting help.
 
Still, another couple years passed before I learned that I might not be able to do all the same things that other people, and that I needed to work *with* my body and not against it.
Working for myself is the best way I can do that. I can sleep the hours my body naturally wants to sleep. I can take breaks from working more regularly and have adjusted my office so I can work either standing or sitting. I’m also able to take time off when I need, and go to doctors appointments in the middle of the day without getting approval from a supervisor.
 
I found that working with my body was an amazing boost to my productivity and my creativity! My best working hours are like 10pm to 2am, so, those are the hours I do most of my painting.
 
I wish something like the Chronic Illness Hotline had been around when I was younger. I might have been able to get support when I was younger and started my self-discovery journey sooner.
 

Some of my self affirming products:

https://charmcat.net/shop/cards/empathy/sometimes-life-sucks-card/
https://charmcat.net/shop/cards/political/become-the-light-card/
https://charmcat.net/shop/cards/empathy/give-yourself-grace-card/
https://charmcat.net/shop/cards/love/dont-have-to-hide-my-nuts-card/

 
Instagram: instagram.com/paperbycharmcat

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