To The Other Side of Dreaming

like we know we are each other’s survival

dear stacey,

I am getting ready to head back to the Bay tomorrow with your temporary lift in my car. 

I am so excited for you that you are in the bay!  How amazing!  I wish I could have seen you when you got in.  seeing you for the first time a week later just seems wrong.  i hope you are having amazing times and loving the sun and the access and learning from older crips!  That last part still blows me away.  It would have changed my life to have gotten to live with and learn from a comrade who had my disability when I was your age.  So, so powerful.  It gives me hope for the kind of community that we are building for and for our work for disability justice.  It is so rare to find intergenerational disabled people of color (queer) community, especially one that explicitly centers disability justice and names our stories in it. 

I have been thinking a lot about community.  Been thinking about how we want to be with each other, especially when things are hard.  Been thinking about growing up in a small, rural place where you just had to learn how to work through things and you didn’t have a choice about who you would work/play with.  The luxury of “finding new people” didn’t exist like it does in many metropolitan places.  Growing up on an island, the idea of “leaving” was so different.  It wasn’t like you could drive to a different county or state, the only way off the island was by boat or plane.  You had to see people everyday, even if you didn’t like them, even if they hurt you, even if you hurt them.  I graduated with 26 people in my class.  

In a lot of ways I hated it.  It felt so small and suffocating at times, you would see everyone you knew everywhere.  It seemed like there was nowhere to go to be by yourself.  Everyone knew everyone’s business (so much drama all the time) and growing up, there was no concept of “finding new friends” when things got hard.  Most of us were pretty much stuck with who we had.  There were times when I would have given anything to leave.  There were times when I wished no one knew me and I could just be anonymous.  

At the same time, I loved it.  I loved the feeling of people greeting each other on the street and never having to wait too long to make a left turn in your car, someone would always stop to let you through.  I loved the feeling of knowing every single person you saw everyday and them knowing you.  I loved what it taught me, especially as a disabled person: how to invest in relationships, how to not think about your relationships (all of them) like they existed in a vacuum, how to think about the people around you as the people that you needed and would depend on, how to not think of people and relationships as disposable.  In so many ways, growing up in a small, rural place helped me learn how to survive as a disabled person.  Just like growing up as a disabled child taught me so many things that helped me to survive as an adoptee. 

I don’t want people to romanticize it, the way that people often do about living on an island, being from the caribbean or being from rural lands.  There were many hard times, of course, and it wasn’t always pretty or good, at all.  there were many things I learned and loved about living in a city, once I got to the States, that I carry with me as well.  St. Croix, like anywhere else, is complex and beautiful and hard and deep and boring and ordinary.  I could never share all of it and I am grateful for what I received and I know that everyone’s story is different and valid.

I miss you and can’t wait to see you.  my small town, rural heart is so excited to begin to build community the only way I know how to (again): like we know we are each other’s survival and we will be here tomorrow and the next day (and the next day) faced with how we treated each other. 

with so much love,

mia

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