Dec 03, 2020
What Does It Take to Be a Woman Who Has It All?
When we look at women who work, what remains unseen and what is expected to remain hidden?
When we look at women who work, what remains unseen and what is expected to remain hidden?
I borrowed a bicycle and explored, in the same way my great-grandfather had gone about on his pony sixty years earlier.
Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?
Disability justices can be, and are, plural.
Everyone’s experience of a diagnosis is different. Here is mine: A key opens a lock I didn’t know existed, sending a door swinging wide.
I’ll drive with that tender balance of guilt and curiosity and a lifetime of learning and unlearning, still looking for an America that was there, is there, and will be there.
When you attribute someone’s evil actions to their mental health status rather than their actual root cause—like white supremacy—then that evil is no longer presented as a choice.
I am the only one in the room who is neither asked nor allowed to answer: “How does that make you feel?”
I try to feel my lungs expanding and contracting, just to make sure they still are. There is something soothing, like the indigo of a fading day, in that reminder.
In my flocks, I’ve borne witness to what I fear.
In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over our family’s story?
The soundstage’s kitchen didn’t have a dishwasher, so he was forced to make dishwasher salmon in the oven instead—like some kind of hack.
I learned to reevaluate the meaning of ‘normal’ in relationships, and also my habit of reflexively turning to data.
I love my parents because they are in me, but I wonder if, when they look at me, they see those parts or instead a shapeshifter who’s slowly taken over the person they thought they’d raised.
Disability ruins everything, these stories tell us: disability itself is tragedy. These people’s lives are over, apparently, even though they are palpably still here.
Yes, I dared to eat a peach. And I had to live, so I could eat another.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Of all the self-chroniclers I’d gone to like a moth in my early twenties, why were so few brown, and Black?
It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to spend a lifetime being told that you are not allowed. Not always in so many words, but in gestures, in spaces, in thoughtlessness.
Perhaps the certainty that you are not the monster—that no matter what you do, you will never become the monster—is what gives rise to monstrous behavior.
Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals.
