About the Organizer
My name is Evan Erickson, and I was a thriving college music composition student Summer of 2024. Now living with severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), I am building Gifts for M.E. : a charity to provide tools like eye masks and noise cancelling headphones for ME/CFS patients in need.
Watch my Spend a Week with M.E. video to learn about what it’s like to live with an underfunded, under-researched, and complicated disease that nearly 3% of Americans are suffering from. Scroll down to read my story.
An illness I never recovered from
In August of 2024, just following my summer job coordinating a concert series for a large music festival, I became sick with something I thought was just the flu. What started as a week of ‘just a normal sickness’ turned into multiple doctor’s appointments, 7 rounds of antibiotics, and at the start of October landed me in the hospital with my liver and spleen almost dying. When the hospital took me in for a weekend and diagnosed me with mononucleosis, a viral infection seemingly everyone gets. I believed that was the end.
It has been one year, and I have never recovered from how I felt entering the hospital last October. 1% of mononucleosis cases trigger a complex neuro-immune disease with no known treatments called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS, aka as M.E.), and I was unlucky enough to be one of those cases.
WHO I’M SUPPOSED TO BE RIGHT NOW
Pre-2025…
“Evan Erickson (b. 2003) is a clarinetist, composer, and engraver currently studying under Robyn Jones (clarinet) and Kamran Ince (composition) at the University of Memphis. He has been a finalist as a composer for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 ASCAP Morton Gould Award, selected to present at the College Music Society and North American Saxophone Alliance national conferences as a performer, and was awarded three distinctions at the University of Memphis as a Presser Scholar, an Award of Outstanding Achievement, and the Chamber Players Scholarship.”
ME/CFS HAS BROKEN MY LIFE
2025 has shattered and cast me into a two-room prison of paralysis, incessant pain, no human connection, and the inability to fully care for myself. I can barely even shower once a week.
When people hear my voice or see my face on a short call, they always tell me:“You sound fine.”
My life got frozen in the past
I was supposed to have the best senior year ever — I finally felt confident in my looks and who I was, I had an awesome girlfriend, I was getting to travel and meet people around the country, I had plans to become more deeply involved in the Memphis community with my electronic clarinet. Then, in the most unceremonious of ways, I spent an entire year on a bed in my Mom’s trailer back in my home state writhing in daily pain.
The most difficult battle has been realizing this old life is frozen in the past. Like everyone experiences with graduation, people are beginning to move on as they build their post-grad lives. Except, I don’t get to build my life or meet new people right now. I am only able to close my eyes and still feel myself walking around my campus, going on fast food runs with my friends late at night, and turning my university’s multi-million dollar music building into a personal movie theater for myself…
Where does this all leave me?
There have been lots of changes. I have had to aggressively accept that my life is smaller now. I have been able to find better fits for my lifestyle stuck in a bed with ME/CFS. Video games are now board games, monitors are all on monitor arms, I have electronic ink screens that allow me to still scroll the internet when I have a migraine, I use my Ninja Creami almost every single day. There is still some joy worth fighting for every day, even when my body can rise and crash like a torrential wave. Admittedly, even the good parts are nowhere near as cool as my plan to apply to study music in Türkiye with my professor. That still stings…
Gifts for M.E. is a natural evolution to the work I was doing in college. I have found great support and community online from other people experiencing my illness. I have latched on to wanting to use my talents and privileges to build this passion project to help others with my disease. Not everyone gets to have a caretaker or have their bills covered by their Mom, making purchasing any non-necessary items impossible in many people’s situations. I refuse to believe lacking privileges like money, time, and luck means you do not deserve good things!
It’s hard to tell you exactly who I am right now: I’m just some dude stuck in a bed feeling like crap every day. But, I like putting smiles on other people’s faces. If giving joy to others is a way to make my journey a little lighter, I think that is worth pursuing.