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

by Alice Wong

I may not find joy every day. Some days will just be hard, and I will simply exist, and that’s okay, too. No one should have to be happy all the time—no one can be, with the ways in which life throws curveballs at us. On those days, it’s important not to mourn the lack of joy but to remember how it feels, to remember that to feel at all is one of the greatest gifts we have in life.

the absence of joy isn’t permanent; it’s just the way life works sometimes.

The reality of disability and joy means accepting that not every day is good but every day has openi...

Internalized ableism—the insidious belief that I would be a better person if I were not disabled—makes

When energy becomes a limited resource, one must become adept at budgeting it wisely—using

Internalized ableism is so hard to overcome partially because those beliefs are so often reinforced in society.

I know the next time I’m at an event and take a picture with someone, I won’t be moving my cane out of the shot.

It’s a kind of love that I hadn’t known existed before my disability. It’s fierce and patient and tender and rare. It’s what disabled people give one another because we wish the able-bodied world had given it to us.

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.

There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability.

That means when a person receives information that the fetus they are carrying has a genetic condition—such as Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, dwarfism, or other mutations—they could not seek an abortion on the grounds of that diagnosis.

“Antiabortion legislation and rhetoric often circulates stereotypical, infantilizing imagery about people with cognitive disabilities as innocents in need of protection from nondisabled saviors.”

To be disabled is, in this world, to experience a problem of body and/or mind so severe that it distinguishes a disabled person from a nondisabled person.

When we give people the opportunity to succeed without limits, [it] will lead to personal fulfillment and a prospering life.

I didn’t think I was “disabled enough” to let my disability hinder me. So I tried to overcome it.

I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration.

The times my emotions would push through were during what I discovered later were hypomanic phases, mood swings so strong they butted through the haze and made me wildly unstable.

Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances.

I take my medicine and work my craft at the same time because I don’t need to suffer as an artist. I don’t need the mania to take flight and reach inspiration. I can do that on my own.

Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip, says that “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

Only melancholia is a true illness, mourning without end, without resolution.

With each new symptom, each new impairment, I grieve again for the lost time, the lost years that are now not yet to come.

When we begin to see our own diversity reflected in the ecology of this planet, we can also recognize that the same forces threaten both.

Comprising no less than 20 percent of the United States population, people with disabilities are the largest “minority” group in the nation.

The phrase “differently abled” suggests that we are the locus of our disability when we are, in fact, disabled by social and institutional barriers.

the highest rates of sexual assault are for disabled people who cannot communicate their attacks.

It’s hard to dream when you’re terrified, and these are terrifying times.

As disabled people, we are often both hypervisible and invisible at the same time.

It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it;

Crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced—something radical and taboo in many parts of the world and sometimes even for people in those spaces.