Dancing After TEN is a graphic memoir you’ll want to give to that person who continues to insist words accompanied by art are either for children or a medium for capes and tights only.

Because this is not a comic for kids and there aren’t any capes. This is an intimate and personal account of how Vivian Chong rebuilt her life after TEN (Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis).

While on vacation with her roommate and his sister, Chong got a concussion and was given “ibuprofen” (read: not ibuprofen). After taking the medication, Chong experienced extreme dehydration and weakness, then itching. Her condition continued to deteriorate until she was in multisystem organ failure and had to be airlifted back to the United States where she was diagnosed with Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis syndrome, a rare and extreme drug reaction that caused her skin to peel off and leave large areas of her body severely burned.

Possible complications are similar to those of any chronic condition that requires a long hospital stay but can also include progressive scarring of the corneas, eardrums, and other structures. Chong, an artist and a musician, was in a coma for two months. When she woke up, she discovered the damage to her eyes had rendered her blind.

As a result, Chong had to learn how to do everything again – from swallow to walk to navigate sidewalks to interact with friends who suddenly acted as though her essence had changed along with her body.

When an experimental surgery returned 20% of her vision for a few weeks, Chong used the time to translate as much of her experience into paintings and drawings as she could. Then, after leaving the manuscript on a shelf for 12 years, she partnered with artist Georgia Webber, who has experience with the graphic medicine genre, to complete the book. (Chong also developed a one-woman show and a dance-theatre production based on her experience.)

I’m not really sure how to review Dancing After TEN. I mean, who the hell am I to pass judgment on anyone else’s physical, emotional, and psychological journey and the way she chooses to tell that story? What I can say is that I’ve had my own and that when I read a book like Dancing After TEN, I feel a little less alone, even though I wish Chong had never had to go through what she went through.

It also reminds me that it’s my job, as someone who’s had to adjust my view of the world and myself – after a traumatic brain injury, after postpartum psychosis, after anorexia, and while living with anxiety, depression, and a chronic pain condition – to speak up for people who have shared their experiences, who are unable to do so, and who haven’t yet found their new home.

For most of this gorgeous, devastating, honest memoir, Chong tries to regain what she thinks she’s lost. Her art. Her music. Her body. She lays in bed and thinks “I will see again” over and over and over. She believes that recovery means erasing everything that happened from her body so she can erase it from her mind and psyche. It isn’t until near the end of the book that she realizes “Freedom is trusting your insight. Freedom is making new experiences.”

That’s a hard lesson. It’s a painful lesson. But it’s also an important one. It shatters illusions you needed to get through the most difficult of your battles, but now the home you wanted to go back to is in ruins. The adage is true. You can’t go home again, and that is terrifying.

But it’s also liberating. Because once a thing is impossible, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Once it’s no longer an option, you suddenly become aware of all the other possibilities the world is offering. That doesn’t mean reaching for them is going to be free of effort or frustration or pain. Chong reminisces about trying out for a theatre troupe and falling off a stage, about going back to dance and finding it nearly impossible to find anyone who would accept her as a partner, about overcoming her fear of dogs so she can find a new companion and way of exploring the world.

It does mean, however, that there’s nothing holding you back from trying.

Vivian Chong reminds us that recovery takes time. That it happens in tiny increments and that we should celebrate even the smallest of steps. That the world will be there when we’re ready for it. That we have the right to advocate for ourselves, not only in the medical realm but also out in society. If we’re to change, the world will have to change with us. And the world will simply have to accept the spaces our new incarnations make for themselves.

Dancing After TEN: A Graphic Memoir by Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber (Fantagraphics) is scheduled for release on June 2, 2020.