Typically, the posts here on the Fine Lines website are short. It’s the necessity of this kind of space. The following post is different. The attached essay, “You Are Worthy,” is in the current edition of Fine Lines, and it’s getting quite a bit of attention. The author is Deshae E. Lott. Her short bio —
Deshae E. Lott, PhD, teaches at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. She worked at Texas A&M University and the University of Illinois at Springfield. Spirituality and living with a disability both infuse Deshae’s professional scholarship, essays, and poetry. In 2011, Lott received for one of her essays an EXCEL Gold Medal from Association Media and Publishing. She has served as a co-editor of the American Religion and Literature Society Newsletter and has published on a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Americans including Margaret Fuller, George Moses Horton, Mary Mann, Julia Smith, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, George Oppen, Maya Angelou, and Annie Dillard. A mixture of syncretism and individualism appears in mysticism, and the mystics whom Lott studies endeavor to contribute constructively to their communities.
“I wanted to provide my official diagnosis in case it is relevant to the photo: Limb-girdle muscular dystrophy Type 2D (AR). It was only about a year ago (and then again this spring) that genetic testing advanced to be able to provide me with this detailed of a diagnosis rather than the umbrella LGMD (and I learned more details, including that — according to the genetic counselor for the Emory U lab testing limb girdle patients worldwide — only 13 individuals at that point had emerged with my very rare variant of the disease, which is more aggressive than most limb girdles and has severe outcomes akin to Duchenne MD and ALS with very early onset like Duchenne).”
And with that, her essay can be downloaded by clicking here — You Are Worthy (pdf)