When a Lupus Flare Lit My Creative Fire
Jonas, 32, Dublin
I was halfway through my master’s in architecture, you know, living on coffee and blind optimism, when the rheumatologist slapped the words “systemic lupus erythematosus” on my file. Cheers, doc. Overnight my wrists puffed up like angry balloons, and every drafting pen felt heavier than a pint of Guinness. Lecturers talked about taking time off, friends offered the usual “sure everything happens for a reason” guff. I nearly believed my career was headed for the bin.
Then one grim November night, rain lashing the windows, fever spiking so hard I was talking shite to the ceiling, I saw the shadows on the plaster twist into mad, gothic cathedrals. Proper haunted-house stuff. Half-delirious, I grabbed a sketchbook and scribbled the shapes: crooked arches, spiral staircases that went nowhere, angles that would give my old geometry teacher a heart attack. The pain blurred my lines, but it also kicked perfectionism out the door.
Weeks of bed rest turned into the best studio I never asked for. Between hot-water-bottle shifts and Netflix binges, I filled page after page with structures that bent, curved and tilted like bodies that refuse to behave. By the time I limped back to campus, I had a portfolio full of buildings that could actually cradle people with dodgy joints, light sensitivity, all that craic. My professors were gobsmacked, they called the work radical.
Fast-forward to now: clients hunt me down for offices with nooks to stretch stiff backs, galleries with railings you want to hug, studios lit so migraine brains don’t feel like they’re in a nightclub. Lupus still barges in uninvited, some mornings I’m drafting from bed, stylus propped against a feck-off stack of pillows, but it’s taught me architecture isn’t about rigid grids; it’s about sheltering messy, miraculous humans.
Yeah, illness nicks plenty, but it also leaves breadcrumbs to new ideas. Every dawn, joints creaking like old floorboards, I glance at those ceiling shadows and think: grand, let’s build something weird and kind today.
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