Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern are two queer disabled diasporic Korean women of color in the process moving from the South to the Bay to create home and community with each other.
This tumblr documents their journey. For more info about Mia, visit her blog at restoring forces: beyond any word for love
dear stacey,
these days I swing back and forth between fear and stress and hope and faith. A giant pendulum moving steadily, silently through the air.
In this moment I feel what is possible. In this moment I feel how beautiful and hard it is to move from a place of intention, even in the face of fear. I am grateful for the people in my life who are able to help me stay connected to intention and love when I am afraid. We are each others’ restoring forces that help swing us back toward our equilibrium.
It means something for disabled people of color to be together outside of institutions, hospitals, group homes and the occasional temporary shared designated spaces. We are so isolated, separated and segregated from each other, unless it is under the tight control of able bodied people and/or the state. There are so few spaces that we can be together in, find each other and recognize each other. There are so few places where we can be together and validate, celebrate and complicate each other. So few places where we can love and hate and grapple with being disabled people of color all at once; places where we don’t have to smile or cry according to someone else’s picture of disability (or race) that they are trying to paint. Places where we can talk about racial justice and disability justice together. Places where we don’t have to worry about being the deserving cripple or the politically correct person with a (dis)ability or the diplomatic differently abled person or the angry, bitter crip. It means something for disabled people of color who recognize themselves as disabled to be together; who are politically disabled, not just descriptively disabled.
It means something for disabled people of color to desire each other outside, and not bound by, the binary of “romantic” or “platonic” love. People keep asking me if you’re my “romantic” partner as if you should be, as if that is the only way to create home and family. As if us being partners would somehow validate what we are doing or make it more “real,” more “sure.” As if the kind of need and commitment we are talking about can’t exist between us unless we are “romantically involved.” But that is the thing: there is something so queer about disability. The kind of concrete need that we have from being disabled, and having bodies that this world was not made for, queers how we think about relating to and loving each other. The way we think about commitment stems from having bodies that need other people; from having bodies that need. And in some ways, that is one of the most freeing things about claiming myself as disabled: I get to need—I get to be disabled.
I used to hate need and needing things, it felt so disabled, so feminine, so adoptee; so much of everything that was me. And I still struggle, it is not easy to need in an ableist society that worships the myth of independence. But now I find myself embracing it more and more, desiring people who desire need, and desiring people who need. Now I understand that I was taught that need was undesirable, I was taught to not desire disability, even my own.
My desire to create home and intentional interdependency with you, stacey, another queer crip korean woman of color; to move across the country together, to practice daily access for the both of us, to creatively think about how we will roll/walk/limp/move through the world together, to imagine how to be whole and connected, to create recognizable language—my desire for this, for you, is beyond any word for love I have ever learned… yet.
<3,
mia
