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 Courage
Dear Stacey,
The other night I dreamt about a lion. I woke up remembering the way its mane looked in the night and how beautiful it was as it glided past me. I looked it up and dreaming about lions can mean different things, and I think in my dream it was signaling courage.
Maya Angelou says, “Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
It takes courage to move, to change one’s life, I know it is scary. It takes courage to live. It takes courage to want for ourselves what we would want for our loved ones. Sometimes it is easier to fight for others, than to fight for ourselves. Sometimes it is easier to dream than to jump. Sometimes it takes all the courage one has to just maintain where you are.
But I keep thinking about the same question: what alternatives do we have to offer? We know the systems are broken, we know even the best options are horribly flawed and dangerous. We know that even disabled people who aren’t in institutions or hospitals are getting abused, beaten and killed at home, by their family members and care givers in their own homes. Or at their jobs, or by their own hands. We know that nowhere is safe. We know that ableism is fertile ground for abuse and domination. And what do we have to offer? Yes, we can keep pushing back against policies and writing amendments and fighting for bigger budgets and less cuts. And all of those things are important, most definitely. Yes, we can keep doing what we do and using our crip powers to piece access together individually on our own or in small clumps of our friends. But what alternatives do we have to offer people?
This move is bigger than you and I. Partly inspired by the Pod People in Detroit, this is an extension of what creating collective access and interdependency could be. Not just living it for 8 days and then going back to our regular lives, but trying to build it in a way that can be sustainable. Trying to imagine collective daily access.
I think about the initial careshift collective that we will build, Stacey, and I see it as a seed; the beginning of what could be a larger collective care network that could actually hold many different types of access needs, not just disability. I think about how excited I am to engage in the work of having conversations about ableism and disability with careshift collective members and the kinds of building we will do together. I think about the work of building more and more disability justice able bodied hands-on comrades and the possibility of training PAs that have an understanding of disability justice for disabled folks who can’t afford to live in expensive Berkely to access the country’s only 24 hour city-wide emergency on-call PA care. I think about access that you don’t have to pay for, or that is not only accessible to those who can afford it.
I think about making what we as a community need. I think about offering what we’ll learn to more and more people in and outside the bay. I think about learning from folks who are engaged in similar work. I think about the task of building alternatives, that are not funded by a 501(c)3 or a foundation. I think about the Pod People.
Imagine if there had been something like this that already existed, that we could plug into—a collective of folks who were already doing this kind of daily work around access and community-caretaking and disability justice. I imagine how that might have impacted our move and what we needed/still need to do to make it even possible to move, let alone live somewhere else.
I imagine down the line what we might have to offer to people: a real, viable alternative to the current broken and inadequate systems. A force. “A wing, a hope, a promise.” And courage.
love,
mia
