Edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Caland-Thomson.
Exactly what it says on the cover: The book is organized by categories ranging from “Justice” to “Joy.” I confess that the first few chapters were rather hard going for me, but starting around chapter 3, they started to become lively personal stories and got far more interesting and gave great descriptions as to what the writer has or is going through. Essays discuss work lives, technology use, coping, relationships, and happy moments.
Standouts:
- “The “Madman” Is Back in the Building” by Zach McDermott, which starts out with “What do you wear the first day back to work after a 90-day leave of absence because of a psychotic break?”
- “The Athlete in Me Won’t Stop” by Todd Balf, about being an athletic sort with partial paralysis who’s “in between” in disability.
- “Am I Too Embarrassed to Save My Life?” by Jane Eaton Hamilton, title sums it up.
- “The Hawk Can Soar” by Randi Davenport: “The way disability stands in for everything you were or ever would have been. Even when you say it will not. Even when you refuse its existence. Disability is contemptuous of your refusal.”
- “How to Play the Online Dating Game, in a Wheelchair” by Emily Ladau: on hiding her chair in dating profiles, to learning to just show it already.
- “Longing for the Male Gaze,” by Jennifer Bartlett, who is obviously disabled IRL and has been creepily come on to once IRL, but tries out online dating (hiding disability) to see what it’s like. She got more respect and less messages (certainly less awful ones) when they find out she’s disabled.
- “Intimacy Without Touch” by Elizabeth Jameson and Catherine Monahon, on the pain of wanting to be able to touch people when you literally cannot.
- “Passing My Disability On to My Children” by Sheila Black, on 2 of her 3 children inheriting her dwarfism.
- “I Have Diabetes. Am I to Blame?” by Rivers Solomon, on being blamed for being fat from an early age and diabetic type 2 and being shamed for eating wrong (“even when my math is perfect, my sugars rebel”) and stopping eating altogether is the only thing to control her blood glucose. ”Diabetes demands perfection, and I am the most imperfect person I know.”
- “Sensations of Sound: On Deafness and Music” by Rachel Kolb, on getting a cochlear implant.
- “I Dance Because I Can,” by Alice Sheppard, a wheelchair dancer.
- “Stories About Disability Don’t Have To Be Sad,” by Melissa Shang, a middle schooler who wrote her own book about being happy with a disability and how she had to self-publish it when publishers didn’t believe that was a thing. “As a girl with a disability, I know that my story is not a sad one.”
- “A Disabled Life Is A Life Worth Living” by Ben Mattlin: “I decided long ago that if I’m going to like myself, I have to like the disability that has contributed to who I am.”
Four stars. Hits you in the heart.