coming up for air
When I map the trajectory of my life in the last 5 years I aint gonna lie the change is pretty fucking depressing.
Hard to believe I used to perform. I used to drive out to beautiful places and walk away from parking lots, cars and people. I used to sell things at markets. I used to go to markets, spend time with folks, start projects, organize, dance and write. All of that within an already disabled and relatively isolated life.
Now I barely leave the house, even to go in the yard. Daily tasks are monumental. my brain is underwater. My heart gasps for air.
The successful eugenics propaganda around the ongoing and up and coming pandemics has gutted any sense of community I had. Which, if I’m honest, was tenuous to begin with. Rarely was there access. I passed as best I could to go to those events, rallies and markets. Such is the state of disability politic and culture where I live. For decades I’ve been that person that always asked “can you please share access info? chair and mobility, fragrance, asl, strobing lights, seating options etc.” and then crickets…or the stock reply of “the space is ada compliant”. I was THAT person. The only one. Easy to brush off in the deep sea of able bodied culture. It wears down edges. it silences. It drowns.
When covid began, the high stakes of it all rehydrated my efforts. “do you have any covid safety in place? fresh air, filters, required masking? is this outdoors?” but its year 5 and I’m crushed again by the tidal wave of ableism. Silenced. Drowned out.
There’s much to be enraged and frightened about right now. For so many vulnerable people. Maybe I should be more afraid as a sick and aging person that lives on precarious and inadequate disability benefits who couldn’t leave the country if I wanted to, who can’t afford housing literally anywhere. But here in this no holds barred escalation of fascism and empire in its death throws what frightens me/saddens me the most is how wholly unprepared we are to really care for each other. How deeply rooted the eugenics, even in the most marginalized and radical spaces. I weep to see gatherings of beautiful at-risk folks righteous in their rage and joy without masks on cuz I know what it means.
I know intimately what covid does to the body. How it dismantles us quietly. Takes root in the marrow, the gut, the heart, the brain, everywhere. How vulnerable it leaves us to other illness. What a truly evil thing it is to convince a people that its nothing to worry about. Or worse yet, that it doesn’t even exist. To let us drown.
