cripchick's blog

since early march, i have told friends that i have not “bounced back” yet. by “bounced back” i mean that this was not the first time i was in a relationship with someone who told me later on that they did not find my physical embodiment attractive. this is not my first time with someone who tried to make the attraction piece “work” because they appreciated my mind and spirit inside of this body, or the connection we had. in fact, this has been my whole life — a string of experiences where i am the friend people are secretly very emotionally intimate with, but the one who is not invited to parties, the friend the person is conflicted about loving, the date who knows the parents well, but not the person’s other friends. it has been an endless struggle to prove and remember worth in a culture that is relentless in its telling of the wrongness of our bodies. i have enough experience now that if i had known this is where she was, i would not have dated her. it’s fine not to like me or not want to date me, but an uncertainty of my body is non-negotiable.

my sadness is not so much loss for her — we barely knew each other. my heaviness is in being triggered to this place of undesirability. in this rampant culture of ableism, wanting myself is something i have fought for. coming back to this place has been very hard. feeling undesirable and angry at my body/reality was unexpected. i was loving my defiant, resilient body with such an intensity. it hasn’t just been being triggered by her that has been hard. i am starting to realize how hard it is to manage all the things a complex body like mine needs. i am learning to love a body that needs so much from me.

i still feel foolish. foolish for opening myself up like that, foolish for believing disabled girl her would know how to love disabled girl me. foolsih for thinking that intimacy was finding another young, queer, wheelchair using, asian girl with a white daddy, political person.

collecting myself has taken:
poetry
spending time with people with kin bodies, who love themselves
writing out on my iphone at 2 am all the ways i have survived (and wanted to stay alive)
saying no to friendships that i am not emotionally ready for
distance
distractions
love & being held in bed while antony and the johnsons play
talking to a therapist at a queer mental health center
affirmation from my community via snail-mail
coming to grips that this body and all the work it takes to live in it is always going to be my reality
learning how to have respect for my body even when i resent it
energy, so. much. energy.

some days i start to feel like the self i once knew, but so many things bring me back to this place. seeing a disability or queer analysis that has no recognition of what it means to live in a non-normative body is a trigger. seeing people i am in community with having non-wheelchair accessible event is a trigger. on a bad day, having a fight at home, a friend forgetting something important to me, or my sister not calling me back all take me to that place. i know it’s my own stuff. i know how i feel about myself has to come from inside.

and i can’t blame her for not loving me. it has always been my lone work.

i wrote poems about you singing your favorite musicals to me outside in the richmond cold so that when i became angry at you, i would remember your humanity. a constellation of hurts made it too easy a thing to forget. i had poems about the pasta you could order three nights in a row, the debates we’d have walking the sticky streets of the district, the 6 am IM conversations we had in the beginning of our friendship, and all of the 3 am conversations we had over the telephone when you were manic.

it was easy for me to fall into cut-and-dry identity politics — not having it, i truly believed belonging would be found in finding queers, finding people of color fam. you brought out the parts of me that did not feel so radically queer and loving someone who was so white made me question my woman of color authenticity. you reminded me of my dad. instead of acknowledging that i can pass as white, i screamed my commitment to the cause as loud as i could. i drew hard lines – can’t work with white people. or people working within the system. or straight people. or cis gendered men. loving you made shit complicated. every woman of color i knew had a white partner and i didn’t want to be another one.

when grace lee boggs sat with you at dinner and entertained your questions about movement direction, it blew my world apart. i knew she should love me — a young asian girl following in her steps — how could she love you too?

those poems — that kind, gallant boy — was why i kept my hands cupped over our small sticked friendship, rekindling it over and over refusing to let it die. still writing poems, i would have never guessed you to be the one to say goodbye, you to be the one to say “i know i am not someone you can love and actually, that’s okay with me because i know i am worth loving.”

i am sorry i was not a better friend to you, that i let myself forget your humanity. i am sorry it has been years learning this lesson that shared values, love, and a commitment to one another is worth more than any shared experience.

thank you for knowing you are worth all the love in the world.

no one sat me down and said:
“disabled girlchild,
this is what you do
if someone does not want you.”

when you looked at my body and cried,
i did not know what to do but
hold you

i held you
cried over me

if one day a disabled girl child
asks for advice about all
of life’s business,
i will tell her to kick you the hell
out of her bed

hold your head high, beautiful one

dear nea,

we haven’t talked in months but i thought tickets to the upcoming j cole show might break the silence. i guess i am too late since you died on monday.

i can’t believe you are dead. ableism didn’t kill you but i wish it had loosened its grip on you so you could have experienced more of the world before you died. fuck everything that held you back.

together, we were our resilency strategies for so many years. we tried to relate to each other as two young physically disabled women of color in the south but didn’t know how to love each other. over and over again we told ourselves that it didn’t matter if we broke each others’ hearts: we needed each other. you never forgave me for my ability to finally end things and i never forgave myself for letting myself become your access bridge to community. resentment, abandonment, trying so hard to build something that is not there, and how thick isolation can sit in one’s throat — these are all things i am trying to remember as i start to create home with mia, another disabled woman of color.

we taught each other so much. you taught me about sex/uality and walked me through my first real romantic relationship. i taught you that you could still have a life in this new alien body you did not know. when i met you, you hadn’t left your room in years. i hadn’t much, either, so we started small: afternoon margaritas one day, a movie the next month, a concert much later. our adventures required so much waiting— waiting for the one nurse who would help you get out of bed and stick your ventilator on your wheelchair, waiting until paratransit van started serving your part of the county, waiting until your sis was safe to be home alone.

maybe we waited too long, i don’t know. i miss you and am trusting that you found the happiness you always said would come in the arms of the lord.

love,
cripchick