Sitting Pretty

I live in a culture that uses my form as a symbol, a shorthand, an illustration for something else – weakness, captivity, and victimization or super strength, triumph, and feel-good inspiration. Even if I do claim a narrative all my own, when I go out in public,I can feel others’ stories written all over my body – stories I didn’t and would never choose for myself I feel like I’m speaking the same language but somehow my words get pulled and picked and sorted until they fit into someone else’s narrative. Our stories continually reduce disability into something small – a trinket to manipulate – as if an experience as sweeping, rambling, layered, contradictory, ordinary, vibrant, and human as disability could be reduced to something so one-dimensional.

For starters, there’s a contradiction between saying a workplace is inclusive even as it participates in the larger cultural values that celebrate everything a disabled body is not. There’s something unsettling about offering accommodations for an ‘exceptional’ body when the entire system surrounding that body is built on the assumption that more and faster and harder and higher is fundamentally, inherently superior. When you applaud your employees only for arbitrary measurement of work – arriving early, leaving late, never taking sick days or time off, or showing up on the weekend – when you always push for more – production, happy hours, publications, softball teams, cases, meetings, tasks, involvement, spirit, extra – you do not demonstrate an appreciation for those who have a need, who say no, enforce boundaries, or require flexibility – the very stuff of accommodations masked under different names.

The needs of my disabled body seem clearer. People see me in my wheelchair, and they expect accommodations will follow closely behind (although most don’t usually imagine much beyond elevators and ramps). But I believe this Full-Time Working Adult system punishes many more bodies than just mine – bodies in pain, bodies swaddled in depression and anxiety, bodies that get pregnant, need to breastfeed, have periods, get cramps and headaches, bodies that move and process slower than others, have different eating rhythms, need naps, breaks, longer toilet times, more inclusive toilet spaces – and so the list unfurls. A system that measures our worth by an arbitrary amount of work that our bodies and minds are supposed to be able to produce within narrow parameters of time and space punishes all of us. We all eventually sag under unsustainability.