ABOUT ME

I’M UNA.

I have lived with invisible chronic illnesses for more than 16 years. For twelve of those years, I did not know what was happening to my body.

I was in my late teens when I began experiencing symptoms that gradually changed my life. Years of appointments followed, of searching for answers and living with something I could not even name. Only twelve years later was I diagnosed with POTS — postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

During the most difficult periods, illness shrank my life to little more than my bed. But in time, I realised that a diagnosis mainly answers one question: what is happening to my body.

A great many others remain unanswered.

How do you live a life you did not plan? Who are you when your body can no longer do the things you once recognised yourself in? How do you explain to others something they cannot see when they look at you? And how do you fight for yourself in the healthcare and social systems when you have the least energy for that fight?

I first tried to make my story with POTS visible in the short film POTS – v bitki z gravitacijo. In it, I showed a part of life with illness that is often invisible from the outside — from the long years without a diagnosis and the period when my world was very small, to returning to the mountains.

Labirint is the next step in the same story.

It arose from the realisation that, with chronic illness, a person needs more than an answer to the question of what is happening to their body. There is still a whole life around the illness: relationships, work, identity, the future, healthcare and social systems, other people's lack of understanding, and the search for a way to live with something you did not choose.

This is also where my personal experience meets my professional path. I hold a master's degree in law, have passed the Slovenian professional examination in social welfare, and am currently continuing my education in the field of marriage and family therapy.

In Labirint, I bring together three worlds I know well: personal experience of chronic illness, legal knowledge, and knowledge of relationships and human experience.

I will not promise you a way out of Labirint.

I have not found one myself.

But over all these years, I have learnt something else: how to live in it, how to find my way within it, and how to slowly recognise its paths.