disability and the other

Disability. Re-reading About Us, collection of essays from the Disability Series of the NYT. What about disability intrigues? Is so articulable? Embodied experience that is truly other. Minority status that unlike race, we could be on the other side of tomorrow. only so many different ways to see the world but living with a sensory or physical disability a unique mindset, a truly different perspective. Essays clearly articulated, solidified, hardened, confident, because lives have spent so long forming, hardening their perspectives around it, living in it, it is solidified, it is hard, it is their reality. The social form, the outside, the environment as that which is disabling. That which we see as soft and fluffy kind party sphere as that which can be naive, blind, not twist an eye toward them. The need to be perceived with dignity. The need for inherent goodness, the ways in which disability comprise essential parts and also bring pain. Isn't it all stories? Our painful parts also defining us, sculpting us in ways uniquely us. About Us. Nothing About Us Without Us. Necessary Voices. Book could not include all voices. Could not include those whose disability prevents them from talking.

Hopefully if we live long enough we'll have a disability (idea somewhere in Chloe Cooper Jones' book, or an Ezra Klein podcast on disability). An inevitable part, often, of a long-lived life. John Altmann, "I Don't Want to be 'Inspiring.'" John Michael Reynolds, philosopher of disability, says the world is essential disabled. Remove an elevator or stairs and a man couldn't make it to the second floor. It would be absurd to accentuate this inability to the point where it's all the man was. John: "So too is it absurd to boil me down to my needing crutches to traverse the world. I am John Altmann, I am not my cerebral palsy. When this becomes common sense to the world, then I will have effectively escaped my disability, even though I will always use my crutches to do so."

Disability as seeable and unseeable. How do we converse about it. How do we ask about an otherness yet ground in sameness. How do we see uniqueness, how what is interesting/constituent to another may be accessory to a self.