cripchick's blog

a friend and i have been having conversations about how hard we have been finding organizing to be lately. like, make-you-hate-yourself hard. energy-sucking hard. questioning-your-every-ability hard. i am happy to learn that september was the month mercury was in retrograde, that maybe it was the universe or something that we could not control that made us all treat each other like that.

that friend and i have been talking about what working in a community where everyone is coming from an extreme place of vulnerability looks like. like if vulnerability is a spectrum, it’s no joke, so many of us in core leadership roles are way down on one end of it. with parents, family members or best friends that we can’t tell we’re queer to. caught and trapped in systems. homeless. brushed aside. left behind. dealing with abuse/ being in abusive situations. creepin’. stuck. disability, the silence around it, the lack of people who actually get us, can be so isolating.  we come to this space where we have access and get to be ourselves — at least for a weekend here, a weekend there—and damn if we aren’t scared as hell to lose it. damn if we don’t whip out all the survival weapons we have hiding under our clothes. damn if we don’t secretly keep our finger on the trigger ready to shoot, not even knowing that’s what we are doing, not even knowing that we are working from a place of insecurity. vulnerability.

or at least it’s like that for me. i am left thinking of all the ways our actions are motivated by insecurity. fear of loneliness. loss of community.  maybe i keep waking up and finding myself in these relationships and friendships that aren’t working because i am scared of being so so so alone. that i can’t take any more isolation or longing. maybe the reason you are so angry with me is because you don’t trust me not to leave you, not to spit on everything you have poured into this friendship.  when i do something small, it ruffles up all these feelings, hits our histories— that gut feeling in you—and soon we all look like the enemy you have been taught to shoot at.

know that we have to be more gentle. more intentional. more aware. just am not sure yet how to put that into practice.

any ideas?

I feel hopeless when I’m supposed to be speaking on sexual consciousness but am feeling disconnected from my own body because I don’t look white, skinny, or able-bodied like the masses of queer people there

I feel like I’m misleading people and betraying my own when I talk about disability in a cross-disability intersectional framework and the only visual image people are getting is that disability=mobility because the only disabled people presenting (including myself) are wheelchair users

I feel home when I fly into North Carolina and am surrounded by bodies of all sizes, shapes and colors— my, how one can miss this love/hate relationship with the South is surprising

Like this weekend, I sometimes feel invisible

Like this weekend, I sometimes feel like I talk about disability too much, but this is hard to balance when I feel like I am brought somewhere to only talk about disability

Like this weekend, I am unsure what the future holds or what community actually looks like for me

Here’s to friends that remind me why I am in this, the spirit of community, and those disabled people and allies who through all this, made the sessions and trip worthwhile.