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"Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall. But friends," // "the future is for crips—"

musings on severance & disability | full citation list below the cut

Every day I think about "crip time is grief time".

Samuels, E., (2017) “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824

#chronic pain #ellen samuels #crip time #disability reflections #crip time is grief time

ellen samuels, six ways of looking at crip time

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Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.

[...] [D]isability scholars like Alison, Margaret, and I tend to celebrate this idea of crip time, to relish its non-linear flexibility, to explore its power and its possibility. What would it mean for us also to do what queer scholar Heather Love calls "feeling backward"? For us to hold on to that celebration, that new way of being, and yet also allow ourselves to feel the pain of crip time, its melancholy, its brokenness?

For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.

--Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.3 (2017)

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I live in crip time now.

Ellen Samuels, from “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”

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40. Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents, edited by Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels

Owned: Yes Page count: 206 My summary: Various essays from people who grew up with LGBT+ parents in the 70s and 80s, detailing their lives and experiences and relationships. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

This is one that’s been on my shelf for a while - I think I read it shortly after I first bought it? There’s a lefty bookshop in town I used to scour for any interesting-looking LGBT+ nonfiction books, and this is one of the ones I bought a while ago. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, essays from children of lesbian, gay, and trans parents (no contributor had a parent who identified as bisexual, as the intro notes), but the reason I find it interesting is the publication date. See, this was published in 2000, with some essays dating from 1996-9, so all of the essayists will have been growing up in the 70s and 80s. Not so long ago in an objective sense, but it makes a world of difference in terms of experiences.

Many of the parents in these essays were deeply closeted - it’s not an uncommon narrative for them to have been married and then come out as gay/trans when the essayist was still young. Many of the stories feature the participants keeping secrets and having to hide the details of their parent’s (and their own) identity from the world. This particularly comes into play in some essays talking about the 80s, when the AIDS crisis was at its peak and gay men in particular were being discriminated against more openly. It could be a very bleak look at the world, and in a lot of ways that’s obviously accurate to the real experiences of LGBT+ folks at the time.

There are a few things that are a little wince-inducing from a modern perspective - in particular, some of the language used around the trans people mentioned is outdated. Which makes sense, this was published 20 years ago, but it’s still not always an easy read because of that.

Overall, though, people like to pretend that LGBT+ people only started existing fairly recently, and this sort of collection is a good example of that not being true - as well as detailing the hiding that said people had to do in order to survive in American society at the time, and how it affected those close to them.

That’s all I have to say here, join me next time for a very harrowing experience as I dive into some Toni Morrison.

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When I say I’m at the hospital, everyone sits up and pays attention. The hospital is serious. The hospital means business. Is there anything we can do? people say to the hospital.

But the hospital is just a place I go sometimes when I am well enough to leave my house.

All these weeks and months I spend at home, drifting the plumb of bed’s expanse. The hospital is not a building. The hospital is here, this pale inland sea.

My mouth is the hospital, opening for the words I can’t think how to say.

My hands are the hospital, reaching for the spoon handle before it drops.

The sound of the spoon hitting the floor is the hospital.

The hospital is the shirt I unpeel from my heat-slick back, and the clean shirt I take from the stack and drag over my head is the hospital.

The basket of unfolded laundry in the living room all week is the hospital.

In the center of my heartbone I feel the hospital beating, through days and nights that bleed into days like a pink-coated pill touched with wet fingers leaks its shell until you decide whether to take it or throw it away.

My dog’s grunts and startles beside me, her trembling repetitive dreams, are the hospital.

The sour at the back of my throat when my breath stops in the folds of night tastes of the hospital.

The pillow I twist to an easier spot, the sheet that escapes from the mattress corner, the quilt knotted around my belly, these are the hospital.

This animal burrow, this rumpled cot, fevered skin and dog’s fur and cotton sheets all petaled together, this is the hospital. And it is home. This is home and the hospital.

Ellen Samuels, On the Hospital.

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What I have found much harder to let go is the memory of my healthier self. With each new symptom, each new impairment, I grieve again for the lost time, the lost years that are now not yet to come. This is not to say that I wish for a cure--not exactly. I wish to be both myself and not-myself, a state of paradoxical longing that I think every person with chronic pain occupies at some point or another. I wish for time to split and allow two paths for my life and that I could move back and forth between them at will.

“Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” by Ellen Samuels from Disability Visibility

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