Ability & Time

    I've found the ideas that "Disability is part of the reality of living in a body - any body." and similar with a temporal dimension that 'everyone becomes disabled' or experiences varying degrees of disability to be the most helpful for understanding care and redefining disability not as lack but as a more artistic and ingenious way of engaging with the world and shared spaces that are designed only for normative bodies. Put on slightly crude but connective terms, if we age for long enough we'll more-than-likely experience physical and mental changes highly analogical to experiences different groups of disabled people have experienced, and that may be helpful for rethinking stigmas of care tied to aging, or that one has to "earn care" through certain metrics of pain and pleasure highly tied to labor-ability. Leaving room for pain and mourning is potent and I've definitely encountered in my own life, where my grandpa has talked about already mourning his only living brother because of the severity of his dementia, which while handling him can be extremely difficult and fear-inducing, there are still moments of joy in both trying to understand his apparently nonsensical streams of thought and moments of sudden lucidity. Not comparing like Ko says, but making connections for a more holistic understanding of what we consider and potentially exclude from the human experiences or categories of humanity.

 The idea of "taking up space" in various ways has also been evocative for my own understanding of different types of physical or mental disability in relation to "crip time" & differing dromological experiences, both spatially and linguistically. Thinking about one of my own experiences, while in high-school at a summer debate camp, I was roommates with a friend who developed an immune disease and was highly prone to seizures, and I had to be on his watch's list to receive an alert if it was detecting a seizure, and while we were lucky enough that he didn't have any for the month there, and I might have had some frustration to being woken up because he was rolling over, I was still grateful in a sense for each false alarm, grateful that my space and time were taken up even I couldn't get back to sleep for another hour, that I could be a resource for that risk should it have actually happened, and could only imagine the year prior where my partner Saif had to to-some-degree save his life when the first seizure happened and was lucky enough to already know what to do since his parents were doctors. 

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