s.e. smith is a National Magazine Award-winning Northern California-based writer who has appeared in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Bitch Magazine, and numerous other fine publications.
While someone’s disability may not be evident to you, it still affects their life—and how they’re treated within and outside the disability community.
We speak of the radicalization of disabled people, but so few have that experience. So many never even know us.
What’s terrifying about Spears’s situation, for a certain kind of disabled person, is that we are a razor’s edge away from joining her.
It upsets cure evangelists to see evidence of disability, right there in front of them.
Beds transmute into a form of policing while simultaneously being promoted as an alternative to policing.
In listings for old pottery that was not intended to be crazed, sellers will disclose what they see as damage: ‘Some crazing.’ Sometimes that’s how I feel. Some crazing.
There are entire lines of therapy that basically boil down to “learn self-control so you never upset the sane.”
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.
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.
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.
