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May 8, 2012 · 10:07 pm
Feeling the Weight: Some Beginning Notes on Disability, Access and Love
This essay was originally published in Issue Ten of Makeshift Magazine.
This is a beginning; a dive into waters that I swim every day, but have been taught not to speak about. I struggle with how to talk about love out loud in a way that holds access and doesn’t diminish love in all its glory, but instead illuminates how ableism twists and threatens love and relationships. Needing to constantly negotiate access for my physical disability within all my relationships in an ableist world has shaped the kind of connection and love I am able to have. I have been scared to open up the Pandora’s box that holds the intimacies of ableism. Scared to talk about some of the deepest parts of what disability has meant in my life.
Most days I feel like access and love are like oil and water. I wonder how the two can possibly coexist. I am speaking of love broadly, meaning any relationship where there is love, whether that is between friends, lovers, family members (chosen, [...]