Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

by Alice Wong

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society,

I am afraid to hope. I am battered by hoping. I am depressed.

Yet I have spent my year alternately living on a heating pad or getting tests. I have accomplished survival. I still have so many things “wrong” with my body, and I am tired of being poked and prodded.

What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. I will still take a cure if it’s presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I’m missing living my life. I know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.

Rebirth Garments

Look up

Hope is my favorite word, but I didn’t always have it.

Independence is a fairy tale that late capitalism tells in order to shift the responsibility for care and support from community and state to individuals and families.