The article was originally published on EverydayFeminism.com and is republished with permission. I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression. Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations. Being in these spaces has … [Read more...]
“Stop Looking at Your Phone”?: 5 Ways Internet Technology Helps My Queer, Neurodivergent Family
Watching my teens interact on the Internet sometimes feel like coming full circle. My own experience with Internet relationships started in the early nineties on a fetish board, complete with black screen and green print. During that time, I was on the tail-end of an emotionally abusive relationship coupled with a lot of confusion about my sexual identity. Socially awkward … [Read more...]
Help Isn’t a Favor: Creating Intimacy and Connection in Disability
I’m that girl, the one everybody goes to when there’s a crisis. I’m there, sorting it, finding out, lending a hand, raising money. That’s me. That was me. Then, one day, I was the crisis. And Then She Fell is the soft title of a memoir of recent events that I never plan to write. I keep making up titles for the not-book, though. It helps me try to make sense of senseless … [Read more...]
3 Ways Toxic Masculinity Harmed Me as a Male Survivor of Abuse
It’s hard for me to write the story about being in an abusive relationship. Not because it’s hard for me to talk about it, though sometimes it is. Not because I’m still carrying shame and self-doubt or because I might trigger my own trauma responses, though I am and I might. It’s because writing about being a male survivor of intimate partner abuse, especially when your abuser … [Read more...]
5 Ways To Strengthen Your Radical Compassion for Loved Ones With Dementia
As soon as someone is diagnosed with any form of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Lewy Body Dementia, or Vascular Dementia, they lose friends and family. Even people who were once close to them may stop coming over to visit. People with dementia often end up becoming more and more isolated because their family and friends don't know how to communicate with them. Family … [Read more...]
Advice for Able-Bodied People: Not All of Us Can “Take a Walk” To Feel Better
Over the last few years, I don’t think I would have made it without the internet. When I think of my reduced blueprint for living, I know it was the internet that kept me from feeling completely isolated, frustrated, and stagnant. I still did feel plenty isolated, frustrated, and stagnant, just not completely that way. I would sometimes imagine how I’d get through a pain day … [Read more...]
6 Things Not To Say to a Wheelchair User
Using a wheelchair in public requires you to develop a strong system of defense mechanisms, as it tends to lead strangers to assume they have access to your body. Sometimes these intrusions are physical, like when someone pushes your chair without permission, grabs items out of your hands to “help you carry them,” or climbs over you to open a door for you even if you could have … [Read more...]
How One Adult With SPD Wants To Explain This Condition to Your Sensory Child
This article first appeared on the author’s blog, Coming to My Senses, and is reprinted with permission. As a delayed-diagnosis sensory adult with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), one of my greatest pleasures is helping newly diagnosed children with the same condition, whether this means championing their parents or explaining sensory issues from the inside. We SPD adults … [Read more...]
3 Reasons Why You Might Not Talk to the Guy in the Wheelchair — And Why I Wish You Would
I have to overcome a lot of issues related to my disability. I was born with cerebral palsy, so I’ve encountered challenges from day one. When you add the fact that I'm a gay man living in the Deep South, a lot of times it’s hard just to live. I’ve only had two romantic relationships in my life. The first was for a little over two years, and my second and most recent one … [Read more...]
Why I’m Wary of Being Friends With You When None of Your Friends Are Marginalized
One day I was grappling with shame and self-consciousness over my tendency to take stock of the kinds of people new people in my life surround themselves with. I was thinking about this in relation to bodies and, specifically, race and fatness. Until that moment I had internalized this behavior as unnecessary, judgmental, and even shallow. But I had a realization that allowed … [Read more...]
Struggling With Sexual Dysfunction in Your Marriage? You’re Not Alone
For some of us, there is no amount of self-love or body-positive work that will inspire passion and sexual chemistry in our partners. For many of us, our partners simply don’t find touching our bodies desirable and aren’t capable of manufacturing that sensation. It’s not about us, though it unquestionably has a huge impact on us. Dressing provocatively, engaging in … [Read more...]
3 Pieces of Advice for Folks Considering Themselves Allies in Social Justice Movements
I have seen a lot of conversations about what the term “ally” means for social justice and radical movements. Is “ally” an identity? What role should allies play in larger discussions of oppression and resistance? Should allies have access to spaces created specifically for those who experience oppression? The goal of many of these discussions is to determine what an ally … [Read more...]
5 Ways To Find Radical Self-Love and Joy in the Midst of Chronic Pain
Though I have been disabled my entire life and have always written about disability, mine has been an experience with fairly little pain. Muscle spasms are common for me and vary in severity, but they have always seemed nothing more than uncomfortable and inconvenient. Sure, they hurt sometimes and occasionally with great intensity, but they're mostly short-lived. As most … [Read more...]
Why I’m Done Being a “Good” Mentally Ill Person
This article first appeared on The Establishment and is reprinted by permission. Content note: This article contains discussion of psychiatric hospitalization and briefly mentions suicidal ideation. I’m being buckled into a stretcher. Restraints are being placed around my ankles when a nurse walks by. “You don’t really have to use all the restraints,” she says to the … [Read more...]
