This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribute to our significant relationships to others: friends, students, nonhuman animals.

When illness and disability strike, it can seem as though one’s very being is threatened. We tend to consider illness a temporary situation, a phase, a phase that will be done with, sooner or later, and the victim of the attack will be rectified, and will survive it. But in chronic illness, there is a gap, a missing piece that cannot be found, despite all attempts. This is not necessarily a loss, as to claim that there is a loss falls into dangerous territory of positing a once complete or whole body and/or self. The losses are not due to a changing body, but rather discriminatory disablement by society’s understandings of disability. When bodies begin to falter, painful experiences of embodiment and how we experience the world begin to emerge. But to survive is to live through, live with, or live without something. To survive is to also be resilient to any losses. To be a survivor is to have been on the threshold of non-surviving, to have considered giving up, letting go – to allow for a break, a rupture from resilience.

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Life narratives are rare in the Gulf region due to many issues. Khaleeji women writing about their lives, bodies, illnesses, and disabilities is almost unheard of. By writing about their illness and disability, authors re-claim their voice and agency, writing their silenced bodies as Helene Cixous urges women to write through Écriture feminine. This presentation considers the genre of illness narrative through using my memoir on Multiple Sclerosis (MS), teaching, and academia. I will read excerpts from the memoir to contextualize the work in order to stimulate discussion. Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness was published on 30 May 2022, the World MS Day. I will share excerpts from the work with the audience and point out relevant issues of the medicalization of the body. Head Above Water considers the intersections of sexism, racism, and ableism. It calls for a destigmatization of disability and illness in our personal lives and in the academy. It is my hope that the presentation is accessible, creative, and inspires discussion.