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 a dream as it touches ground
dear stacey,
My heart pounds fast and hard as I think about our new home. And not just for all the reasons you mentioned in your last letter—all the amazing and glorious reasons (yes!). But also for all of the things on the flip side of that coin. All of the things I feel hesitant to voice, but that play on repeat in my head.
At the same time that I have been wildly anticipating this moment, I have also been a bit afraid. I crave home at the very same time that it terrifies me.
I have the kind of doubts that anyone has as they prepare to leap over a canyon. no doubts about what’s on the other side, only the deep breaths of: what if we fall? What if this has all been for nothing? Maybe we’re wrong? Doubts that only exist in direct proportion to how big the risk is—and the risk is huge. Am I ready to gamble on our precious relationship? On the possibility of the reality of daily crip interdependency? On the possibility of the reality that home could actually exist and be a place i, all of me, could belong in?
what to do when the seemingly impossible becomes a reality? It is one thing to live in possibility, but another thing to witness a dream as it touches ground.
What to do with time spent face-to-face in a home where i can speak about the things that matter to me, the insides of me, freely? And where understanding is ground-level? Where we are not afraid of being made to feel peculiar or “too much” or any of the other silencers that have been hurled at us, simply for voicing who we are. Where we can hold our different, multiple truths as disabled women of color, korean women, queers—together. Where we can talk and cry and grieve about how our communities have excluded us, judged us, broken our hearts. Where we can love each other.
Where we never forget the stories of where we came from (Atlanta, Fayetteville, St. Croix), as asian women who grew up in the South and the Caribbean; and always stay grateful for the abundance, history and legacy of this new part of the country as korean API women. Where we never forget the kind of isolation we experienced and the reality of what our lives were like; and help each other to never take what we will receive for granted.
where we never question what connection is made out of because we know connection can look many different ways, especially as crips who have to whittle and weave new ways of staying connected (to each other and our communities). where we never levy one connection to a community over another’s’ because we know as queer disabled adoptee/mixed race women of color from the South/Caribbean, it could be (and is) a full time job just keeping up with all of our communities that we so desperately love and need. And we know connection is deep and layered and bloody and tender.
We have done all of this over the phone from different cities in the South, to cities that now span the country. We have spent long nights, days and early mornings sharing and learning each other, making due in a world where our bodies are not free. You are my family, my kin and I am so excited for our new home with each other.
you once wrote me, “i am excited to be doing this with you—together it seems like fear is not needed, that everything is possible.” It is.
i am ready to leap, together, as we bet on ourselves. A sure bet, but a bet none-the-less.
ready and love,
mia
