Bethany

“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. When that doesn’t work, we can remind ourselves that 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 openings for small pockets of joy.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“The medical uncertainty compounds patients' own uncertainty. Because my unwellness did not take the form of a disease I understood, with a clear-cut list of symptoms and a course of treatment, even I at times interpreted it as a series of signs about my very existence. Initially, the illness seemed to be a condition that signified something deeply wrong with me⁠—illness as a kind of semaphore. Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

It took years before I realized that the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society's pathology.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

“The tensions between prayer and work, or contemplation and action, have been the topic of much discussion and argument. Some people put all their energy into prayer, believing that through prayer God will act in the world. Other people put all their energy into work, believing that only through the efforts of human hands and hearts will the work of the world get done. Still others see the need for both prayer and work but are puzzled whether one is more important than the other. I believe that the tensions we experience are actually not between contemplation and action, but between contemplation and agitation or between action and escapism.

(from Praying with Body and Soul, 105)”
― Jane E. Vennard, Praying with Body and Soul: A Way to Intimacy with God

“What worries me most about the proposals for legalized assisted suicide is their veneer of beneficence—the medical determination that for a given individual, suicide is reasonable or right. It is not about autonomy but about nondisabled people telling us what’s good for us. In the discussion that follows, I argue that choice is illusory in a context of pervasive inequality. Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. Common causes of suicidality—dependence, institutional confinement, being a burden—are entirely curable.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century