God I'm never going to forget how I read the Defying Doomsday anthology at exactly the right time. Earlier in that year I had just watched Train To Busan, and I fell into such a depressive spiral because it made me realize that in an apocalyptic scenario, I'm too disabled to run and too much a drain on resources in the eyes of the ableds to be worth rescuing. It took reading fantastic stories of disabled survival to snap me out of it after months of despair, something my abled and healthy therapist was concerned about bc she thought my relying on fictional narratives for hope was "a crutch" (more on that later)
Anyway I read the anthology towards the end of twenty nineteen and holy hell was that the perfect timing as we entered the covid era and it's causal and overt eugenics. Even at its scariest, and my God I'm still terrified six years in to this continuing pandemic, DD and the sequel book that came out a couple years into the screaming twenties, Rebuilding Tomorrow, made me realize I am worth saving. I am worth surviving.
(It took the pandemic and it's accompanying eugenics for my abled and healthy therapist to realize how important stories of sick and disabled people, even fictional stories, are important for everybody to hear and read, something she admits to have been ignorant of as I first excitedly gushed about the book)
