Sitting Pretty Quotes

“The goal is not to avoid falling or needing help. The goal is to be seen, asked, heard, believed, valued as we are, allowed to exist in these exact bodies, invited to the party, and encouraged to dance however we want to.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“A world built on speed, productivity, more, more, more! and far too few bathrooms (and bathroom breaks) does not consider or care for the actual bodies we live in. In other words, ableism affects all of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or not.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“This is one of the most beautiful parts of being a human—the drive to connect and understand, heal and blossom. This is the kernel that takes my breath away. The piece I want to hold on to.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Ableism can be hard to hold on to or pinpoint, because it morphs. It lives in distinctly personal stories. It takes on ten thousand shifting faces, and for the world we live in today, it’s usually more subtle than overt cruelty. Some examples to start the sketch: the assumption that all people who are deaf would prefer to be hearing—the belief that walking down the aisle at a wedding is obviously preferable to moving down that aisle in a wheelchair—the conviction that listening to an audiobook is automatically inferior to the experience of reading a book with your eyes—the expectation that a nondisabled person who chooses a partner with a disability is necessarily brave, strong, and especially good—the belief that someone who receives a disability check contributes less to our society than the full-time worker—the movie that features a disabled person whose greatest battle is their own body and ultimately teaches the nondisabled protagonist (and audience) how to value their own beautiful life. All of these are different flashes of the same, oppressive structure. Ableism separates, isolates, assumes. It’s starved for imagination, creativity, and curiosity. It’s fueled by fear. It oppresses. All of us.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“This stronger feminism asks who has power and who doesn’t, where does that power come from, how do we disrupt the great disparity between the powerful and powerless, and what are alternate ways to access power while caring for each other?”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Each of us has a “whole,” “unmarred,” “perfect” body that we were meant to have; the paralyzed, autistic, deaf version is just a sadder, lesser version of that original intent. (This tenet is wrapped up in narratives of fat, aging, gender-nonconforming bodies, too, of course.)”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“What would happen if we decided disabled bodies were worth including? When I say “included,” I don’t mean just the dressing room designated as the “accessible” space or the handful of first-floor apartments across an entire city designated as the “accessible” units. Access is more than the moment one disabled body bumps into one accommodating object. Access is a way of life, a relationship between you and the world around you; it’s a posture, a belief about your role in your community, about the value of your presence. There’s a fundamental difference between the experience of the person who wakes up taking for granted that they will, of course, have access, and the one who wakes up and wonders whether they’ll have access, how they’ll find or fight for their access, what they’ll do when they don’t have access.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Instead of fixating on disability as The Problem, the social model focuses on the experience of disability, the context of disability, the environments creating disabling moments. The social model looks at this image and says, ‘Let’s shift our focus from the woman in the wheelchair to the building with only one point of access. How limiting!’ The social model says, ‘Let’s build a ramp! An elevator! Let’s redesign this building with fewer stairs, and while we’re at it, let’s open up this floor plan!”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Instead of disability as the limitation, what if a lack of imagination was the actual barrier?”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“God, I pray that you would bring healing to Rebekah . . .” Wait, healing? Healing, as in the prayer I said “no” to? “Bring healing to Rebekah in whatever form she needs to be healed.” Very nice, I think. Such clever maneuvering. Maybe you’ll get your way, and I’ll rise from my chair and walk across the floor yet. “Amen,” she finishes.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“I’m swimming in privileges I can’t even fathom. “I’m not sure,” I hesitate. “I’m like one tiny person. What do I even know? What can I say about Disability?” “You’re not trying to be ‘The Voice of Disability,’” Alyssa says, placing heavy air quotes around this make-believe title. “Right. Of course. There’s no such thing. No universal experience of disability,” I say, sounding a bit too condescending for a conversation where I’m actually the one flailing. “Right,” Alyssa says. “But you have a voice, and you’ve been handed this microphone. What do you know? What can you point to? Who can you bring with you?”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Technically I can get out of bed, get dressed, and out the door. I’m slower and need help to pull up my pants, but this is my new normal. I will show them I’m not a burden.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“We should bring disabled perspectives to the center because these perspectives create a world that is more imaginative, more flexible, more sustainable, more dynamic and vibrant for everyone who lives in a body.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“I live in a culture that uses my form as a symbol, a shorthand, an illustration for something else—weakness, captivity, and victimization or super strength, triumph, and feel-good inspiration. Even if I do claim a narrative all my own, when I go out in public, I can feel others’ stories written all over my body—stories I didn’t and would never choose for myself. I feel like I’m speaking the same language but somehow my words get pulled and picked and sorted until they fit into someone else’s narrative.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“So, I have to ask. Are you two brother and sister?” He seemed genuinely puzzled, which I suppose makes sense, considering he’d seen us holding hands, kissing, and flirting for the previous twelve months. As I’d been busy living out my life as the star of my own romance story, he’d been busy trying to figure out what narrative made more sense: the Helpless Asexual Girl with a boyfriend, or two siblings in love. How far must he stretch his imagination to see me and my chair as a legitimate romantic interest? It seems it was hardly fathomable to him. I took a beat, tilted my head, and looked back at him. “No,” I said,”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“A group is marginalized because society marginalizes them. Society also has the power to change that. What would it mean for disabled folks if society saw us as acceptable, equal, valuable parts of the whole?”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“I no longer saw myself as the sole source of the problem. With an hour and a splash of alcohol, I moved through my own self-loathing to locate the problem outside of myself. And even if I hadn’t figured out how to navigate that shift yet—even if I handled it with rage and a filthy mouth—it was a step away from making my body a perfect host for shame. I was able to recognize that this guy lacked understanding. That he could imagine only the stories he’d already been told, and in those stories, disability was only ever linked to sad defects, broken bodies, and dashed hopes.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“Disabled people are expected to cope with their own social ostracism, to handle being misunderstood and misrepresented, and at the same time to put at ease those who perform the ostracism.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“How can I take him with me through every grocery store where half of the items tower above my head, every obstacle course sidewalk, each maze between me and the ramp at the back of the building next to the garbage dump, every bar and bank and café with counters so high they erase me from the room, every restaurant and airplane where the toilet is entirely inaccessible to me? Would these field trips illuminate why I started to believe I didn’t belong, wasn’t welcome, didn’t have an invitation to be here? Would it solve the puzzle of a smart, competent girl becoming convinced that she’d never be able to join a workforce that exists on this planet? What hour could he live with me that would give him a glimpse of the power health insurance has over my life?”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“After all, if God wanted you to die in a car accident, no piddly seat belt would make any difference, and exposure to germs made you hardier.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“I am not—by any stretch of the imagination—the representative of all disabled people. That’s not a thing. The fact that I have a very visible disability (turns out it’s difficult to overlook a wheelchair), and the fact that I was disabled at a very young age, changes the way you and I experience this body of mine. Even folks who share these same traits will have their own slant on what it means to them, because the experience of disability is as varied as the experiences of childbirth or breakups—there are at least seven billion different ways this could go, and even within one person, feelings can contradict or change over time. Disability expands into every possible corner and intersects with every other identity. I would be doing all of us a great disservice if I led you to believe that the conversation starts and ends with bodies and experiences that look just like mine.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body