The thing on my mind is that the longer I’m in this disability space, the more I realize it is science fiction Out Here. Like there is a massive forcefield vibrating between the “abled” (pre-disabled) world that participates in the eCoNoMy and then there’s Out Here, beyond the forcefield: the disability space. Existing at the edges of capitalism (I read a book called Living at the Edge of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid a few years ago about this idea) because you are *useless* to the workforce completely changes your orientation to what’s possible, what’s acceptable, what’s realistic for your life. Learning to live in the disability space feels like how I imagine it might feel to learn to live on a space station or through a portal to an alien world. And that is, as I understand it, science fiction.
I was looking for a different quote from adrienne maree brown when I ran across this one: “science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together”, from Emergent Strategy. By the transitive property of my neural pathways, it goes something like this: disability space is science fiction and science fiction is practicing the future and disabled people are therefore the purveyors of the future back to us in the present. They- we- fling ourselves (or are forcibly jettisoned) to the farthest reaches of the universe, radically imagine the futures furthest away from us now, and come back to today with what disability justice elders might call “crip technology” and something like precognition. That’s how far-flung disabled people are; forced by the crushing ableism of being ejected from all kinds of layers of society to create entire new infrastructures and networks and technologies and built spaces and relationships and care systems and value systems. Living at the margins of capitalism like in the disability space is as close to living outside of capitalism as you can get these days and the experience demands and cultivates a much more radical imagination than the average pre-disabled person living inside the forcefield might have.
I keep thinking about this because it feels like the weirdest thought stream I’ve ever tried to verbalize. I’m struggling with it even as I know it to be true. If you know me at all, you know that science fiction, outer space, and fantasy worlds all have too much Whimsy in them for my taste and kind of make me feel… squicky? Even talking like this makes me feel little uncomfortable. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about the vantage point of the disability space and other disabled people seem to know what I’m talking about. What it means to live outside the forcefield and see the abled (pre-disabled) “workforce” for what it is. See what the machine of capitalism’s ugly form really looks like. Disabled people excel at surviving daily apocalypses out in the stateless lands beyond the forcefield. They have long known what some of us are only just learning now as we enter year three of pandemic conditions on top of accelerating climate crises and rolling empire collapse; they understand what’s coming.
“We live in impossible times!”, I tweeted the other night. “Which means everything is possible!” I was, among other things, reflecting on my own experience of becoming disabled and consequently pushed out of the workforce when I tweeted this. Because the thing that has happened to me as I worked less and less over the last year until I couldn’t work at all anymore, is I became/become less and less tethered to the deep conditioning we all have around career development, work as identity, and work as the only protection against precarity. It didn’t take long after my employer asked me to resign for all of the thinking, the value systems, the career milestones I was supposed to achieve but never did… the entire scaffolding that propped up the structure of my life just fell away. And it fell away quickly, actually. Everything used to revolve around my job. Now *nothing* revolved around my job. Not my sleep and eating schedule, not my income source or my healthcare, not my sense of security in an uncertain world, not the way my body moves through its daily rhythms, not the demands on my time and my priorities, and definitely not my sense of worth. Everything I thought was so immutable about how I fit into this world and made sense of it evaporated, floating away like a dandelion puff.
Because if you can’t work? What can you do? What’s possible when your creativity isn’t sapped by your (*cough* exploitative *cough) work conditions? What can you imagine when the thing you need to interface with the world doesn’t exist yet? How do you fill your time and meet your needs and craft a purpose in your life if you can’t work a conventional job? Literally anything is possible Out Here, it turns out. None of it is easy, most of it is precarious, but all of it is possible.
Yesterday, for the first time in my 35 years of life, I cut up magazines and made collages, just for fun, just to try it. “Just for fun” and “just to try it” are sentences I’m sure I’ve never uttered before this week. It was a revelation to me to do something just for fun, just to try it, just for me, and *not* for money. I’ve never been able to create an idea in my mind and then execute that small vision with scissors and glue before.
Other things have changed about me too, as I adapt to living in the disability space. I’ve read more books since becoming disabled than I had in all my pre-disabled adult years combined. My thinking is more expansive and more generative (see: this very blog post) since becoming disabled even as my memory and cognitive function seem to shrink away. My ability to communicate and stay regulated through emotions and conflict has improved since losing my job and my relationship with my spouse has improved, too. My ability to provide care or show love to the people I’ve chosen has increased and become more authentic since becoming disabled. My disabled body is the most intuitive, grounded, and knowing body I’ve ever had even as it has become weaker, more uncomfortable, fatter*, and less reliable. Disabled people are well-prepared for navigating collapse as well as imagining more accessible, sustainable, and abundant futures for everyone because they already do it every single day of their (our) lives.
So despite how bizarre it feels to speak it, disability space feels like science fiction and disabled people are the futurists, practicing the future together now.
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*I don’t know how to talk about the myriad ways I feel about my body as a person striving toward a fat liberation politic while also swimming in environmental diet culture while also getting fatter as a part of an ongoing disabling experience. There’s a lot here and I don’t have the range or the gumption to do it yet.
It’s felt really hard to organize my thoughts lately. I’ve had really poor concentration and low exertional tolerance; I’ve been napping the last couple afternoons. It feels harder to make my brain do certain kinds of thinking- I mentioned in my last post how I had a panicked moment where I couldn’t remember how to get home. Even here at home, a lot of hours per week are spent feeling unable to do almost anything. It took me about twice as long to craft this blog post as an average one takes. It feels pretty devastating (if I could afford the exertion of feeling those emotions) to be experiencing this buzzing creative incubation period for the first time in my life while also feeling like my overall function is declining. I always want to be writing or reading or thinking or making something and I’m almost always actually just playing Alto’s Odyssey sandboarding on my cell phone or watching but not absorbing content because my body can’t do the higher functioning. I’m trying to remember that rest is generative too (this is Nap Ministry wisdom).
Jarno Hakkinen says
A woman in the same story where the demands make her demand from other people that she’s incapable — lazy don’t leave the house Rachel Bean
I find it gross to employ terms that are used to describe actual discriminatory social difference — ableism, queerness — by people like you (inevitably white and pretty heteronormative) who’ve decided whatever disappointments they have about themselves are either 1) too depressing; or 2) too boring to share face value.
Why does a heterosexually married overweight woman who was never diagnosed with COVID get to crowdfund on the internet because she can’t work because of ‘fatness’ and ‘long COVID’ and her ‘queerness’?
It’s a complete erasure of what you’re complaining about was meant to mean — disability, body image, sexual and gender identity — simply because you ended up as a sweaty lump and needed to co-opt other people’s vocabularies of oppression to make yourself feel righteously useless.
I hate the expansion of (wounded) language and the inclusivity of certain left wing groups because all it does is render important distinctions meaningless.
If you can choose to be oppressed because you greedily suck up the language of the marginal, what does that mean for people who can’t get Twitter to pay their next six months of internet and utility bills?
It disgusts me, aesthetically and morally. Who do you think you’re fighting for other than your own desire to be recognized, validated, and pitied?
rachelisthinkingoutloud says
Thanks for taking the time to write this all out.