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,

Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopolitical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.

In those moments, love appears and says: “You think you’re heading toward a specific point, but the whole justification for the goal’s existence lies in your love for it. Rest a little, but as soon as you can, get up and carry on. Because ever since your goal found out that you were traveling toward it, it has been running to meet you.”

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.

disabled people don’t exist to make abled people feel better about their abledness.

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.

Those in positions of power, evidently fearing that people are talking about them behind closed doors, persistently insist on barging into such spaces. They call these spaces divisive, and their organizers are told that they aren’t valuing the contributions of allies. These bursts of petty outrage at stumbling upon one of the few places in the world that is not open to them inadvertently highlight exactly why such places are needed.

as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground.