guest post by Trilce García Cosavalente
I am a visual artist and a graphic designer. I was born and raised in Peru and currently live in Finland with my family. I have been lucky enough to travel a lot and I love meeting people from different countries and communities, but still I have been very timid and reserved. So I see art as a safe place to express myself when words are limited. Drawing became a way to express how I perceived the world, and comics have become a powerful language to convey my way of seeing things.
I have been fascinated by how written and visuals can complement each other so well, even before I started to experience chronic pain, I used to consume a lot of non-fiction comics and graphic medicines without even knowing that later in life I would be creating them as a catarsis.
In 2013, I started feeling a very sharp stabbing pain in the vulvar area. All tests were coming negative and thus began a long medical pilgrimage of many years to be diagnosed with Vulvodynia. Vulvodynia is still a huge taboo and doctors in Peru don’t know much about it, so the chances to get treatment were few. Even though I was totally depressed, I never lost hope and tried to find the right treatment until I finally found it. So I did a comic called ”Chronic Pain, when the brain tricks you!”, because for me what is really important is helping to inform about Central sensitization (the pain IS real) and talk very openly about women’s sexual and reproductive health issues. This was very important for me, because in this process with vulvodynia many women have written from fake profiles because the stigma and shame is very big, we cannot even say the word ‘vulva’ or ‘vagina’ without blushing! so I decided to put myself in front and say that this type of ‘problems’ should be normalized and there is nothing to be ashamed of.
You can find the comics full versions here and download a free copy:
English: https://survivingpaincomic.com/
Spanish: https://comicsobreviviendoaldolor.com/
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