Gabrielle Drolet is finding new ways to create with chronic pain

CBC

17 hours ago

Only a month after publishing her first cartoon in The New Yorker, Gabrielle Drolet's chronic hand pain began. She was told it was just carpal tunnel syndrome, but the doctor was wrong — it quickly progressed into a debilitating disability that prevented her from drawing at all.
"Suddenly, every little task that you use your hands for without thinking about — sending a text, or chopping onions, or opening a can of beer — all of these things were really difficult on top of the career stuff," Drolet says in an interview with Q 's Tom Power.
"It was really crushing that suddenly I couldn't really draw," Drolet explains. "I tried to ignore the pain and just push myself, which made my symptoms much, much worse. I was just ignoring my limits, and I suffered the consequences of that for sure."
With her poignant grief and quirky sense of humour, Gabrielle Drolet processed her life-changing experience into a memoir. Her new book Look Ma, No Hands captures the overwhelming shock of when her chronic pain began, and balances it with comedic anecdotes about trying to navigate her new reality.
" Someone I knew had mentioned she was writing erotica for an app, and asked if I would be interested," Drolet says with a laugh. "And so I was doing it, but it just felt so silly because it was with voice-to-text. And it was summer, so it was so hot. But I felt as though I couldn't open my windows, because my neighbours would hear. Because we have shared balconies. So I'm steaming, I'm stewing in my office! And I'm reading these scenes just out loud to my computer. And that felt like a real low point for me, Tom."
Voice-to-text has been a crucial tool for making writing easier for Drolet. She wishes there was an accessible alternative for drawing as well, but there isn't. She's recovered as much as she could, but she still has to draw less often than she used to.
"My career generally — and especially my relationship with drawing — is different than it would be if I could draw all day without pain," says Drolet. "I would do it a lot more. But I have a very ergonomic setup. I take breaks, I stretch.… But yeah, it's still different." Like many people with a long-term disability, Gabrielle Drolet has gotten a lot of unsolicited and uninformed advice about how to fix her condition. She says that although these people have good intentions, they don't realize that they're trying to force a simple solution for a complex issue.
" With a young person, because it's not as common, people immediately think that there's a quick solution that I just haven't tried yet," says Drolet. "Immediately people jump to, 'Oh, take B-12', or 'Stretch!', or 'I have a great chiropractor.'
"And there was a while where I did take all of that advice. Because I was like, 'OK, the next thing I try is gonna be the thing that heals me.' And that's just not how it works for a lot of people, unfortunately," the author explains.
Although it's been an intense journey, Gabrielle Drolet no longer spends time wishing that her condition would go away. She still takes moments to acknowledge her loss, but ultimately, she realized she had to make peace with the new path her life has taken.
"There's no point in continuing to dwell on it.… I gotta keep it moving," says Drolet. "There will always still be moments of wondering where my life would have been if that hadn't happened. But also there's been so much good that's come from it. You know, I moved to Montreal. I adopted a pigeon."