To The Other Side of Dreaming

difference

dear stacey,

I feel your rage, I share it.  I feel it inside of me for us, for me and for you.  The rage sits so deep, feels overwhelming at times.  For me, there are many different sides to it because sometimes we use rage and anger as ways to unite, and in the process forget about difference.  My rage is complex because, even as I am angry at the system of able bodied supremacy and the ableism that permeates our lives, I do not want to erase the differences between us as disabled queer women of color, especially as disabled women.  I don’t want to erase the ways that we are different from each other.  They are so important.  Yes, there are many ways we are similar and the same, even; there are many ways that ableism shapes our lives in ways that make us distinctly recognizable to each other.  But there are also deeply different ways that our disabled existences have been forged, intertwined by forces of colonization, adoption, the Caribbean, the south, whiteness, class, connection to family and queerness.  It is pointless to fiercely claim our belonging as fellow disabled people if that belonging relies on prioritizing our experiences as disabled people above all other experiences; or if we have to pretend that we are all the same simply because we are afraid to lose each other to difference; simply because we are afraid of our own complexities, so we would rather hide in lies than tell the truth.  But I believe difference can grow belonging too. 

To not acknowledge the ways that we are different, as disabled people, is to be complicit in the erasure of disabled people’s lives, histories and stories; to be complicit in each other’s erasure.  It is the same way I feel about disabled people who don’t have bodily difference and who do not talk about what that means.  I feel like part of my disability gets erased, part of me gets erased.

I move through the world as a disabled person who can stand upright, who can walk/limp along side able-bodied folks.  A disabled person who passes sometimes, as able-bodied people live in denial or simply wonder how I hurt myself and when I will “get better.”  I am someone who has to sometimes navigate how to flip insider able-bodied language on its side without risking my own loss of access.  I am a disabled person who doesn’t “have” to think about wheelchair access and can usually use the bathroom most places and can visit most of my friends at their homes and build intimacy, love, and relationships in most non-public spaces.  I am a disabled person who doesn’t have to navigate, juggle and plan ahead for PA’s on a daily basis, but whose access work and needs have looked very different, not worse or better, but different.  And there is more, so much more.

I feel this as I trudge through visiting house after apartment after duplex and their owners.  How do I leverage what able-bodied privilege I have as a disabled person towards creating a home that could hold us both, and other disabled people?  How do I hold us both together, as disabled people, with the differences we embody?  How do I practice crip solidarity across disability?

The reality of the move is coming into focus.  Sometimes I think, what the hell are we doing?  Sometimes it feels so overwhelming and huge.  I’ve been fighting against internalized woman of color ableism that keeps coming up inside of me, that we should be able to do this on our own and not ask for help from our communities who are already so strapped and for something that still feels so much like a dream, like something that folks like us aren’t supposed to have.  the voices in my head say we should just make do with what we have, we’re not special, and everyone else does it.  and then i also think about the concrete need of this: like being able to fucking get into your home—into any home—or being able to go to the bathroom, use the shower.  Being able to have a space to be with people.  The reality that once we move, there aren’t even going to be that many places we can go to, get into, be with people in.  Will we be able to go over to people’s houses to build with them outside of public spaces (the limited accessible public spaces that is)?  The knowledge that what we are doing here is finding not just space for us, but for community as well.  we are finding home to be intimate with people in, to be queer in, to be women of color in.  we are making accessible queer space, accessible queer people of color space, accessible disabled queer people of color space, for all of us; something that i have been yearning for, for what seems like forever. 

We are creating places where we can begin to build past these concrete divides of stairs, money, bathrooms, doorways… silence and exclusion. Places where we can be in conversation with able bodied queer people of color and other disabled people of color about how we are different.  Places where different people can be different together; places where our difference doesn’t keep us from even entering the conversation, building, home, activity.  Places that can begin to work against the erasure and lines that separate and divide, but instead, work to support the drawing of different lines that can connect and grow us.  together. 

love,

mia

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