"If I wanted to be a good victim I would have to clean up my language."

😡🤬😡

This was my first time hearing of crip time and it blew my mind away. I felt so seen, it gave a new way to explain to people how it is to live disabled, similar to how spoons changed the game when discussing chronic fatigue.

Ellen Samuels says:

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.

Sometimes it feels like I'm not the owner of my time, I'm bound to whatever my disabilities allow me to do on a certain day. I can't make plans or schedules for my day because my disability is unpredictable. I don't grief time anymore, I'm privileged enough to be able to slow down and stop time when my body requires it, but every now and then I'm reminded of the autonomy abled people get and my heart aches for those who don't get to slow down even when their body is screaming for a break.

Crip time is not only time travel, is grief time, is broken time, is sick time, is waiting time...

"I want to be aligned, synchronous, part of the regular order of the world. Like the leaves just now turning as the year spins toward its end, I want sometimes to be part of nature, to live within its time. But I don’t. My life has turned another way. I live in crip time now."

So started listened to the audiobook. And then, I thought, maybe I could read the ebook at the same time? But duh, you can’t really do that on Libby unless you have two different devices open at the same time. And I didn’t. But what I happily discovered was that the ebook has lovely pictures in it. So I’m really glad I have both versions.

"How to Make a Paper Crane from Rage" by Elsa Sjunneson was one of my favorite essays. I read a lot about social justice, and feeling angry is something I can't control. I spent years thinking society was doomed and expecting the worst from everyone, building barriers to avoid getting even more damaged than I already was from discrimination. But the past couple of years I've learned to transform my rage into vulnerability, to uplift and educate people, to create spaces where it's okay to make mistakes and be better. Not sugarcoating things, not open to debate about human rights, but a place free of judgment as long as you're willing to improve. NOTE: This was a personal decision, and we shouldn't expect marginalized people to educate their oppressors📢

I want to share a bit of what Elsa wrote that I still think about:

So I turned to being radically vulnerable. Instead of simply being angry at the world, I started to think of ways to show people why I was angry. I show my anger, but that anger comes with a distinct expectation of compassion, with a need for people to see me as more than just a disabled woman—as a person. A person who feels so strongly about the world she lives in that she has no choice but to turn her burning rage into a beacon.

Amazing, showstopping, never done before Defo one of my best reads of this year give me spookier good omens in the yiddishland ? Yes please