In August of 2005 Andrea Rosselle, then 29, was driving her jeep with her dad behind her in the moving truck, heading north, from Houston, Texas, to what would be her new place of residence in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. Shortly after a pit stop, an odd feeling came over Rosselle. She first thought that it was the soda she drank. Then her head began to hurt. She picked up the walkie-talkie next to her and paged her dad. “We have to stop at the next rest stop,” she told him. “Something’s wrong.” She drove a little further hen paged her dad again, more urgently, “We need to stop now.”
Her father drove her to The University of Michigan Medical Hospital where they ran several tests trying to find the cause of Rosselle’s migraine, numbness, and inability to function. One hospital visit, several rounds of testing, and ten months of waiting anxiously, Rosselle was finally given a diagnosis. She has multiple sclerosis (MS), an auto-immune condition she would live with for the rest of her life.
At first, Rosselle was angry with her diagnosis. However, she has found her own way to work through her feelings of hurt and anger and to confront the illness face forward. “I’m learning to find the beauty in that which I cannot change. Because I have to,” she says.
Rosselle’s MS is called relapsing-remitting, which means that when she has a disabling attack, she recovers some, but not to the health she was before. She loses more of her abilities with each attack. Rosselle’s first known attack was during her drive up to Mt. Pleasant. After some reflection she thinks she may have been having minor attacks since she was 17 years old.
Rosselle says she feels her MS “every minute of every day.” A lot of her body is numb. A line from her armpit to her knee hurts in varying degrees constantly. “I live in a state of depletion,” she says. MS robs her of her energy and dexterity and affects her brain, causing headaches and loss of memory. “Sometimes you feel like you just want to die,” Rosselle confesses.
Everyone handles challenges in their lives differently. Rosselle’s outlet is art which she has loved ever since she unknowingly spent from dawn till dusk working on a painting for her high school class. “I had never experienced something that you could get so lost in,” Rosselle recalls. Today, she holds three degrees: A Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in ceramic sculpture and a minor in secondary education; A Master of Arts in ceramics; and a Master of Fine Arts in visual arts.
Rosselle, a tall woman with a bubbly personality and short strawberry blond hair, has a studio in the basement of her Portland home. It’s small and cluttered with incomplete work and tools. The walls and windowsills are lined with drawings, art from her past, and supplies. Clay covers the floors where her wheel is and a shelving unit carries clay molds strapped together, different colors of paints, and various miniature clay forms to be used later.
Before Rosselle’s diagnosis, her art consisted of paintings of religious icons. When she learned she had MS she stopped painting completely. Her final piece, painted before her silence, hangs on her living room wall. It’s one of her icon figures, filled with sorrow. The figure is trapped in the image of a big red barn, a common structure in Michigan where she received her diagnosis. “Here I am in this place which to me feels exceptionally desolate,” explains Rosselle, “I had literally been diagnosed with MS in a place where I knew nobody and I was completely alone.”
Rosselle is slowly coming out of her painting silence, but only when necessary. A good friend, Michelle Flora, asked her to paint at her wedding, and then again at her daughter’s dedication ceremony. “She has the ability to walk into a situation and be able to speak to that situation through the form of art,” says Flora. Both paintings now grace the Flora household’s walls.
Since her diagnosis Rosselle’s art has moved its focus from religious icons to her disease. “My art became almost like my psychiatrist,” she says. “It was my counseling, it was my food, it was my everything. It was how I dealt with it.”
Rosselle often uses forms resembling living organisms, such as barnacles, to represent disease, which she describes as something that is invasive, evasive, uncontrollable, but beautiful. “Disease is not what we think of as a beautiful thing,” Rosselle says, “but if you start to look at it microscopically, it’s really quite stunning.” She tries to think of her relationship with MS as symbiotic, as a way to find a truce, to maybe get something out of her disease.
Rosselle’s most recent piece, “Inside Out,” is on display at an art gallery in Portland, Oregon. The piece is two sets of doll heads cast out of clay. The heads are cast from the same mold to show that anyone can have a disease. The first set, Rosselle says, shows how chronic illness isn’t immediately visible. It’s skin deep, but close to the surface. The second is about disability caused by chronic illness and what it does to the body. Rosselle wants people to see her work and “to realize that life is that fragile and kind of a blessing,” which is something she has learned herself through her disease.
Her art wasn’t the only thing that changed with her diagnosis, Rosselle had to completely readjust her lifestyle. Before her diagnosis she was a spontaneous, adventurous woman who never felt truly settled and travelled to wherever God sent her. Instead of spontaneity, Rosselle now has to plan every day to avoid becoming exhausted or overwhelmed. If she overexerts, she risks another attack. She’s had to change her eating habits, cutting out dairy, gluten, MSG, and processed sugars. She has to stay out of the sun lest she faint. She sleeps more and has to be very careful with exercise.
Rosselle’s art is beginning to show her moving beyond the struggles of MS and into world issues. For the first time since her diagnosis, she is about to start a piece that is not about MS. It will be called “Death of Water.” It’s about water born diseases that are the leading killers of children aged zero to eight. “I think that’s a breakthrough for me,” she says.
As things are, Roselle lives day to day, moment by moment, but is constantly moving forward. “My life is just uncertain and I’ve learned to live in that uncertainty.”