Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

Disability can give us new stories for navigating an ever-changing world. New stories like: Maybe hard work has its limits. Maybe your efforts aren’t the best barometer for predicting your successes. Maybe the state of your body isn’t actually the ticket to happiness. Maybe when someone’s difference scares you, that’s the precise moment to lean in, shut up, and listen. Maybe true love can be tender and caring and steady. Maybe some shit just happens, and it’s not for a greater good, but maybe you’ll find a way to be okay anyway. Maybe there aren’t happy endings, maybe life is more like a bowl of soup flavored with contentment and angst, victories and heartbreaks, joys and defeats, rage and peace, and maybe it’s a special thing when you get to share that soup with anyone. We don’t want to include disabled perspectives just because it’s nice or fair to the “handicapped” people. We want to weave these stories into the collection, we want to consider disabled folks as worthy of their own, ordinary storylines, because without them, we are less robust, less flexible, and less equipped for the ride we’re already on.