- "There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin."
- "I remember the moment I realized the pain had become chronic. That I couldn't concentrate because so much of my mental energy was relegated to ignoring the pain. I couldn't read, I couldn't cook, I could barely dress myself. Everything was agony. Was this my new baseline? I sobbed, and it hurt, but I couldn't stop the tears."
- "What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow."
- "I will still take a cure if it's presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I'm missing my life."
- "The erasure of disabled people is one of the most common international crimes against humanity."
- "Whether in East Asia or the United States, cultural values validate the narrative of worthy and unworthy bodies. But the entire discussion needs to be rewritten as marginalized creators and activists repeatedly point out that there are no unworthy bodies."
- "Taking up space as a disabled person is always revolutionary. To have a name is to be given the right to occupy space, but people like me don't move easily through our society, and more often than not survive along its outermost edges."
- "It is a privilege to never have to consider the spaces you occupy. I come to this realization every time I do the work to anchor Sandy Ho and Hoa Tien Yun to the world, and it is exhausting to still need permission to encompass all of myself. But in the spaces formed by marginalized disabled people, my existence is allowed on our shared world map in a way that is liberating simply because here I am presumed whole."
- "Disabled people don't exist to make abled people feel better about their abledness."
- "What I have learned is that it is more comfortable for able-bodied people to call a disabled person's valid concern and fear a tantrum or a petty fit, because to agree with or to acknowledge the rage would require abled people to introspectively recognize their privilege. It would require them to understand that a disabled person has a right to be angry, not just at the specific blockade in their way, but at a society that creates those blockades."
- "This is disabled poetics. This is disabled praxis. It's about interdependence. I couldn't do it alone, but I did it with her help. She needed flexible work, and I gave that to her. It's part of the ethics of care and support that so many disabled people show one another. It's a kind of love that I hadn't known existed before my disability. It's fierce and patient and tender and rare."
- "Fortunately, love isn't a collection of capacities, of practical contributions. My love isn't diminished by my inability to carry my son up the stairs, just as it isn't diminished by the fact that I didn't carry him inside my uterus."
may 12 2023 ∞
may 12 2023 +
