Disability Visibility Quotes

“People ask me, “Have you tried yoga? Kombucha? This special water?” And I don’t have the energy to explain that yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve tried crystals and healing drum circles and prayer and everything. What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. 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.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to reach out. People need to be lifted up.

The story of disabled success has never been a story about one solitary disabled person overcoming limitations—despite the fact that’s the narrative we so often read in the media. The narrative trajectory of a disabled person’s life is necessarily webbed. We are often only as strong as our friends and family make us, only as strong as our community, only as strong as the resources and privileges we have.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“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

“Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we’re doing, is not the only possibility. —Harriet McBryde Johnson,
Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“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

“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.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story—my story. But I guess that’s how life works sometimes—noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“I don’t understand it,” I continued. “These things, they just keep happening, and I know it has to mean something. It has to. I want my suffering to mean something. I want this pain to matter.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Storytelling can be more than a blog post, essay, or book. It can be an emoji, a meme, a selfie, or a tweet. It can become a movement for social change.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Advocacy is not just a task for charismatic individuals or high-profile community organizers. Advocacy is for all of us; advocacy is a way of life. It is a natural response to the injustices and inequality in the world.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Just knowing your rights (or your worth or value) will never be enough if you are powerless to force someone else to respect them.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“There is a cyborg hierarchy. They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us Deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the Hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture, and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They don’t count as cyborgs those of us who wear pacemakers or go to dialysis. Nor do they count those of us kept alive by machines, those of us made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or antidepressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a “person” with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin. Pushback to this idea often comes in the form of the social model of disability, which states that we are disabled by society and lack of access rather than by our bodies. For many, the social model can be liberating: by locating the cause of our problems outside our bodies, we can begin to love ourselves again. Tackling systemic ableism may feel like tilting at windmills, but it is still easier to address than some kind of failing within ourselves. There is a criticism of the social model of disability, located in the idea that some disabled people may want a cure. Particularly with matters like chronic pain/chronic illness, a cure is seen as something that can itself be liberating: a way to simply be in one’s body without feeling pain, for example. There is a danger in the cure mentality, as it can be a slippery slope toward eugenics when it is applied by abled people. Many in the Deaf and autistic communities do not want a cure and feel that those who advocate for a cure are advocating that they not exist anymore. Sometimes it comes down to how we see our individual disabilities: Are they an intrinsic part of who we are? Or are they an identity that comes with a side of agony we would gladly give up? How do we feel when abled people start advocating for “cures”—which may come in the form of eliminating our people entirely—rather than when the desire for a cure comes from disabled advocates?”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“But at what cost? I mean, don’t get me wrong: I would have given almost anything to be rid of that pain. Yet I have spent my year alternately living on a heating pad or getting tests. I have accomplished survival. I still have so many things “wrong” with my body, and I am tired of being poked and prodded. Perhaps none of this makes sense. Or perhaps it makes sense only if you live through it: the hope, the barrage of tests, the self-blame when your body still refuses to cooperate and just get better. There is a cost to pursuing miracle cures. It is a high cost.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“This may feel true for every era, but I believe I am living in a time where disabled people are more visible than ever before. And yet while representation is exciting and important, it is not enough. I want and expect more. We all should expect more. We all deserve more.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“So many disabled people live short lives, largely because of social determinants of health like lack of healthcare, inadequate housing, or unmet basic needs such as clean air and water.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“We should not make disabled lives subject to debate”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing,” says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“A brain injury is a particularly hard injury to have because it changes who you are in ways that other injuries don’t, since it affects how you think, act, and respond. It’s hard to talk about that loss and grief with people who have never experienced it.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“But Carol Gill says that it is differential treatment—disability discrimination—to try to prevent most suicides while facilitating the suicides of ill and disabled people. The social science literature suggests that the public in general, and physicians in particular, tend to underestimate the quality of life of disabled people, compared with our own assessments of our lives. The case for assisted suicide rests on stereotypes that our lives are inherently so bad that it is entirely rational if we want to die.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“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.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“Internalized ableism is so hard to overcome partially because those beliefs are so often reinforced in society. It's not just in our heads. It's in our daily lives and experiences...and then it gets in our heads.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“This year when I run my tongue around my mouth, know I am sharpening those new bones into teeth.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“What I have found much harder to let go is the memory of my healthier self. With each new symptom, each new impairment, I grieve again for the lost time, the lost years that are now not yet to come. This is not to say that I wish for a cure—not exactly. I wish to be both myself and not-myself, a state of paradoxical longing that I think every person with chronic pain occupies at some point or another. I wish for time to split and allow two paths for my life and that I could move back and forth between them at will.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“A lot of folks equate the manic energy of being bipolar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “There it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!” Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“In high school, I confided in a nurse that I was trying to be sexually active, but bladder and bowel incontinence were affecting my ability to be intimate with my then-partner. Their only solution was to suggest that there would be people who would be “into that.” My dating pool was instantly reduced to people who would fetishize me.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century