Solidarity

Devon McKnight:

To me what people miss with the idea of disability is they think wheelchair, but you being depressed could be a disability because it's limiting your ability to function. 

The only way to kind of better ourselves in that way I guess is to be practicing it everyday and it's tied to every other social injustice that you can think of. Even the way we think about trying to fix it. A lot of people aren't really...they're like well instead of just medicating me and numbing me out why don't you let me be who I am and you change. What if society changes to work with people?

Alice Wong:

For all the challenges I face with my body and health, abelism is by far the greatest barrier in my life. If you're wondering what I mean by ableism, I describe it as a form of oppression that systematically devalues disabled people who are considered non-normative in the way they look, behave, move, think, or their way of being in the world. And the ideas of what is considered 'normal' constantly evolves. 

One example of abelism within the context of healthcare is to look at the language of disability. Speaking broadly, the focus is on a person's functional limitations, impairments, or deficits. Discussions on quality of life tend equate well-being and health as the absence of illness and disability. Because of my apparent physical disabilities, many people, both strangers and acquaintances, presume that my life is one that's difficult and full of suffering. 

I am totally dependent on personal assistance for my daily activities and cannot breathe without ventilatory support. For some people, that is an undignified, unimaginable, and pitiful way of living. Some of these people would rather be dead than be in my position based on perceived loss of control, weakness, or fragility. And that's ableism.

Mia Mingus:

Ableism and other forms of oppression have left their mark on us. We cant on the one hand understand how devastating capitalism, misogyny, and criminalization are and then on the other hand pretend as if they don't affect how we treat each other and ourselves. Our lives are illustrations of disability and intersectionality and there is a wealth of knowledge there for us to learn from and use and for so many of us we don't tell our stories. 

If we don't tell our stories who will? If we can't share our stories with each other then who can we share them with? Who is that person? Who are those people? 

How do we build more and more of these kinds of folks and more and more of these kinds of spaces to be able to hold all of our stories because I wonder what the things needed to hold your stories are. I wonder how many pieces of your stories weren't told because there wasn't anybody who could understand and hold them. And I wonder how many parts of all of our stories that we still have never told anybody because of this. 

I wish that I had known that there was so much more out there especially during my hardest times. Especially when I was inside the medical industrial complex experiencing so much violence. Especially on those mornings when my blisters were still so raw from the days and weeks before, but I was still forced to put on my painful brace. A brace that I didn't need to be whole. That I didn't need to be whole, but others needed me to wear so that I could be the right kind of disabled child, right. One who they needed to be seen as trying to be as able bodied as possible. Trying to fix myself and walk and make my body be something other than it was. Something other than I was. Something other than I am.

Solidarity

Kumar Butler