performing disaster: a lyric essay on being disabled at a private art school
at art school, it’s cool to be a mess. it’s cool to not sleep at all and drink six cups of black coffee and smoke american spirits. at art school, you perform disaster. you craft a narrative that makes you as tired, as messy, as overworked as possible. this is how we measure ‘success’. at art school, the best thing you can be in a slow motion trainwreck. let everyone watch you burn. how fucking magnificent you are as you fall apart.
the last time i pulled an all-nighter was over a year ago. it exhausted me to the point of dysfunction. the next day i could barely walk. i spent all night like the ideal art student. on the floor, hands and knees, painstakingly moving the parts of a stop motion animation, my saint of a boyfriend snapping photos for me from a tabletop, because even then i knew i could not do it alone. see, i didn’t know the name yet, then, but i have a genetic disorder.
ehlers danlos syndrome is a series of conditions and symptoms caused by defective collagen. in layman’s terms: i’m floppy. medically, i am not supposed to kneel. i have known this since middle school. but i did it anyway, because that’s what art school is. it’s doing the thing that hurts you in the name of art with a capital a, even if it might be better you know, not to actively cause yourself harm. but that isn’t cool, and art school is all about cool. at art school the coolest thing you can be is a slow motion trainwreck. a jack kerouac roman candle, burning yourself at both ends. everyone will watch you burn fabulously. everyone will love you. everyone will love you and it won’t matter if you haven’t slept, haven’t eaten, can barely force yourself to stand.
academia was not built for me. academia was not built for anyone like me. you can see it the minute you open an article about academia and disability and see person first language. ‘persons with disability,’ instead of ‘disabled person.’ see, the implication here is we are not defined by our ability level. the thing is that i am. you cannot separate me and my disability, you cannot separate me and my genetics, cannot separate my body and broken. disability is my reality, it is my only reality.
people used to call frida kahlo a surrealist, a title she fought. this was her reality, she argued, painting the pain her body was wracked with into every painting. painting her trauma in bright primary colors. starkly visible. impossible to ignore. all roses come with thorns.
when i read a slam poem about my body, about my mind, about the ways in which i just don’t work quite right, someone always thanks me. someone always tells me they’re grateful. glad someone stood up, someone said it, someone brought it all into the light.
poets also perform disaster. but it is less we are performing disaster and more like we are opening the bedroom door. we are crying on stage. we leave the bathroom door open and do not run the shower and our roommates hear us sobbing. we are dysfunctional and we are loud and we are loudly dysfunctional. i will shut my eyes to stage lights and shout to strangers all the ways in which i am not right until they understand. until everyone understands.
at art school, it’s cool to be a mess. but only if you can still go to class. it’s cool to be a mess, but you still have to play into the system that was not built for you. they give you accommodations but they are a rickety stepladder and you need an elevator. they are a rickety stepladder and you just need to lay down. you are a roman candle and you are burning at both ends and you are crossing your fingers and hoping to god you live until graduation.
photos of the set up for my thesis defense back in november of 2017! over a year of my life went into this final project (book available here!) and i am so gosh darn proud! information on the project and contents of the boxes can be found here
some different iterations of a more visual poem about/from the perspective of echo, the greek nymph, the last one, despite being pretty simple, is honestly probably my favorite, though i may try a blue to grey gradient in the background
one of the central points of my thesis book is the fictional ‘mount olympus hospital’ located in the san fernando valley. this is because one of the first characters for this story is persephone of greek myth, and many of the other characters also come from greek myth, so it made sense as one of the sort of ‘pins’ holding the world together
persephone is in an inpatient psych program, and i designed this letterhead for her epistolary pieces in my book. (terrible handwriting not final, obviously)
yeah the res here isn’t great, but you can’t pixel on 300dpi pages okay??? here, have some fun thesis mock ups! briar rose (aka sleeping beauty) is an 18 yr old girl with complex regional pain syndrome and her chapter of my book is (hopefully) gonna be in blog format! this is just a quick basic mockup, but the ideas and themes and colors are all p solid!
