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

by Alice Wong

These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. Disability Visibility is also one part of a larger arc in my own story as a human being.

the presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.

“My heart is so small…it’s almost invisible. How can you place such big sorrows in it?” “Look,” he answered, “your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world.”

a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama, who, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, said this: Man surprises me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.