Hey look, I'm hosting a blog carnival!!!

Hey all, I am THRILLED to be hosting the January edition of the Disability Blog Carnival!!!!!!!!!! What is the DBC, you ask??? Oh, my dear, you have been deprived! The DBC is, quite frankly, a collection of posts on disability and a specific theme. The theme, and the host, changes from month to month, and I am humbled and honored to be hosting the first disability blog carnival of the new year. The...

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Long Nights and A Beautiful Sunrise

Once upon a time.....Once upon a time, I was scared and lonely. A lot of changes were happening in my life. I was eight years old and just coming to terms with my own disability. I realized that I was always going to be this way. I didn't have any friends who really self-identified as a person with...

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International Day of Persons With Disabilities

Today is International Day of Persons With Disabilities. On this day, I encourage you all to be out and proud disabled persons, or if you are non-disabled, allies and friends of disabled persons. I know that on this day I am extremely proud to be disabled, however many hardships that may bring me, it also brings me a unique, beautiful perspective on the world and infinite opportunities I wouldn't...

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Three strikes, yerrrrrrrr out!!!

My post for the November Disability Blog Carnival. Enjoy!Our society is very rigid in its expectations of a "normal" person. A "normal" person is white, male, straight/comfortable in their own gender and able-bodied, and very little deviance from this Norm is tolerated. It's when someone deviates from two or more of these standards that we get intersection theory - where, in a nutshell, you get treated...

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A Musing on the Word "Disabled"

....or "The Social Model in A Nutshell".Lately I've been musing a lot on the language used to describe myself or other people in regards to ability/lack thereof. Let's face it, there is no good word to describe us. I regard all of them as fairly horrible, with some being less horrible than others. So in that regard, I usually use the word "disabled" or some variation of it. But what does "disabled"...

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Up De-nial River Without A Paddle

....wow that was bad. Please forgive me for what I'm sure is the poor quality of this post. Given the events of the past few weeks, I'm shocked I managed to pull together a coherant post for the September Disability Blog Carnival at all. I really wanted to write a post about my changing identity now that I'm a college student with a disability instead of a high school student with a disability. That...

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Check me out at Love On Wheels!

I was recently honored to be interviewed by Ekiwah Adler-Belendez for his blog Love On Wheels. Ekiwah has cerebral palsy and is an extraordinary poet. Ekiwah was one of my earliest heroes and inspired a lot of my own writing, so I was extremely honored when he asked me for an interview. His blog, Love On Wheels, deals with the complex issues of sex, sexuality, and relationships in relation to disability....

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Death (or permanent disability)

I've always been fascinated by medicine and medical shows of all types. When I was younger I seriously considered becoming a pediatrician before realizing that a pediatrician with bad motor skills would probably be a total fail (can you imagine me giving someone a shot?? "Oops, sorry, stuck a major blood vessel, no big deal!"). Then my own interest in my CP led me to the idea of becoming a neurologist...

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The Importance of a Crip Community

This is my post for the August DBC at Brilliant Mind Broken Body. The theme is distance and I dearly hope I didn't stray too far off that topic. Hope you enjoy!When you're one of the only disabled people in a community full of ABs, you feel like a burden, like being different is wrong, and you aspire to be "normal". That's what society tells us, and when there's no one around to counter that assumption,...

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It's not that simple.

My post for the July Disability Blog Carnival. Considering I was not home and did not have access to a computer for the majority of the month, I am amazed that I can actually get a post in for this month. I am awesome. Onto the post!Recently I've been working on a huge milestone for me - learning how to drive. This will be an extraordinarily difficult task for me, but in light of a few recent paratransit...

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It's Our Story

Have no spoons between having gone through a week of hellish AP exams and having a horrible cold, but I'm still attempting to do the May Disability Blog Carnival. The theme this month is "Story".------------------------------------------------------------The disability story is pervasive. It transcends all races, genders, sexual orientations, economic backgrounds and many more. It is a common thread...

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Harry Potter and the Disability Invisibility Cloak

*Copying and pasting things into Blogger from MS Word is hell. Please forgive any font/formatting incongruities. Let me know if this causes problems for anyone and I'll try to fix it.*I want to make something clear: Harry's invisibility cloak IS NOT, I repeat NOT, a direct metaphor for the experience...

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It's the most wonderful time of the year...

No, I'm not talking about Christmas, I'm talking about BADD!!!! BADD stands for Blogging Against Disablism Day, and it's a truly spectacular collison of disability bloggers from across the globe. Disablism - or ableism - is basically disability discrimination of any kind. For a better explanation,...

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Balance, Or Lack Thereof

The very act of moving for me is a careful calculation of balance. In school, I swerve and stumble through the halls like an toy top spinning crazily this way and that. I have a ginormous backpack situated precisely on my shoulders, and if you're not careful, you will more than likely get smacked with it. My crutch stabs unmercifully the floor or unsuspecting people who are stupid enough to get in...

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Spread the Word to End the Word

So after all the positive responses to my post for March's Disability Blog Carnival, I've made a promise to myself to blog more, and today is the perfect opportunity. Today is End the R-word Day. The R-word campaign, run by the Special Olympics, is a national effort to "change the conversation" and...

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I am not "just like you".

Sooooo....haven't updated since May. Good to be back. Hope someone's actually reading this. And while you're at it, check out my new website, Mosaic Webzine. It's a monthly/sort of monthly webzine dedicated to disability culture, pride, and empowerment. Sort of like this blog, except the difference is on Mosaic other people actually write stuff, and it's not just me going on about myself all the...

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