Today we welcome Hinges creator and Black Cloak artist Meredith McClaren to the blog, where she shares her deeply personal reflections on health, identity and transformation.
These themes also appear in Meat Eaters, her new graphic novel from Oni Press that arrives in stores July 7. It follows Ashley, a young woman looking to escape her stagnant small town life, but whose carefully laid plans are shattered when she wakes up one night covered in blood—and discovers she’s dead. As Ashley grapples with this shocking transformation and the changes happening within her, McClaren weaves a powerful story that resonates with her own experiences of unexpected life upheavals.
My thanks to the author for sharing this with us. It’s a wonderfully written essay with illustrations in the same style that I see on her Tumblr, which I recommend you follow if the essay resonates with you. You can also check out her travelogue on visiting Greece.
FUN TIMES
By Meredith McClaren
Author and Illustrator of MEAT EATERS
Your body will betray you.
(That’s a bummer of a starter sentence. Sorry. But stay with me, I have a point.)
Your body will betray you. It’s a universal human experience. I’m sorry. There’s no getting away from it. Some of us get there faster than others but we all eventually find ourselves in the unenviable position of feeling truly, utterly, devastatingly betrayed by our bodies.
For me it started with a tickle at the back of my throat that never went away.
I tried describing it to people. ‘You know how it feels when you suck in a big breath of cold air?’ It’s the way your throat feels tight. Constricted.
‘Sounds like asthma.’ One of my friends said.
But I wasn’t coughing. Yet. It was just a tickle. And it was always there.
The coughing came later. Over months. Over a year. Just one or two. A day. Everyday. Then it was a couple of times a day. Every time I woke up. Every time I went to bed. Sometimes an extra one somewhere in the middle.
It wasn’t until a friend’s wedding that I really reconciled that there was a problem. And I couldn’t really ignore it anymore.
‘You cough a lot.’ My Dad said.
‘I know.’ I said.
Destination wedding in Flagstaff. A higher elevation. I was coughing. And I knew it wasn’t just the thinner air.

So, I saw doctors.
I SAW A LOT OF DOCTORS.
I found out all the names for doctors. Pulmonologists. Gastroenterologists. Allergists.
Turns out a lot of different things can make you cough. What you breathe. What you eat. What you touch.
I’m fine. Apparently. Perfectly healthy. All normal ranges. No abrasions in the tissues. No abnormalities. A fine specimen. Maybe lose a few pounds.
By now, the coughing fits make a regular appearance several times a day. Sometimes I get scared. If they happened while I’m driving, I could lose focus on the road. I cough with my whole body. Maybe I crash. Make a bad situation worse.
Perfectly healthy.
I learned what an endoscopy was. They take a little camera and put it down your throat all the way to the stomach and look around. A bronchoscopy is much the same, except that they take a detour and go to the lungs.
It all sucks.
Something is wrong. That sucks. No one can tell you what’s wrong. That also sucks. The real kicker though, and please know, it’s a bitter pill half the time, is that life keeps happening. While everything sucks. While you’re going ‘through it.’
And you have to participate. Regardless. All the time.
Kind of a kick in the teeth really.
You’ve still got bills. You’ve still got social entanglements that you want to keep alive and fostered. You’ve still got cats to feed and trips to take and people who need you so very much.
This is the place that MEAT EATERS comes from. The lead, Ashley, has been betrayed by her body in the most crucial of ways. She has literally died.
And somehow, she must keep going. Because the world didn’t stop when she did.
It won’t.
A bitter pill.

Like Ashley, we don’t get a lot of answers for what happened or why. Most the time, the best advice she gets is just how to move things around and adjust to this new ‘un-life.’
‘Drink coconut water.’
‘Don’t piss off the werewolf population.’
‘Maybe take up running.’
Ashley’s mad.
I’m mad too.
It means something to me that Ashley keeps going though. Sometimes you have to see someone else go through it for that to make sense. I can’t be proud of the fact that I’m still doing stuff. But it means something that I made Ashley. She’s in the same space I am. Something’s wrong with her. And it might not get better. But she’s still getting on with it. If I’m proud of her, shouldn’t I be proud of me?
If you’ve gotten to the part where your body has betrayed you, I hope Ashley’s story means something to you too. I hope you see something of yourself in her. If you’re cheering her on, maybe extend the same courtesy to yourself. If she deserves it, so do you.
Life is really tenacious. Even if you don’t have it anymore. It sneaks in. It wants your participation. It makes you laugh when you don’t want to. It makes you find a spine when you’re scared. It makes you brush your teeth, and shower, and get groceries. Eventually.
One day, like Ashley, we’re all going to die. Literally, or figuratively. But eventually literally. And then the world is going to stick around and ask for a little bit more of you.
It won’t let you go.
It’s strange. A weird bitter kindness.
Life is always going to want you, even when you’re gone.
I’m still coughing. I still don’t have any answers. My most recent pulmonologist is threatening to send me off to the next one. They don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe someone else will have a better clue. Maybe the answer is in how I sleep.
I’m also in an airport lounge. I’m waiting for a flight. I’m going to ride a bicycle with my dad through some beautiful scenery. I don’t like biking a whole lot. But my Dad does. And I like him.
There’s going to be hills. I look forward to those. It’s fun to go fast. And when our rides are over, Dad will probably find an ice cream joint for us to check out. (I could swear he has a special sense, just for heavy cream.) We’ll sit and people watch, and it’ll be great.
I might cough.
But I’ll be coughing in a pretty place.
And that’s better than coughing at home.

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