Dear Reader,

This time last year was the first time I’d ever heard of Disability Pride month. I had just started privately calling myself “disabled” weeks earlier. I don’t know if I felt proud. I think I felt relieved. I let July pass me by.

In retrospect, it would’ve been a great opportunity to simply say, Hey! I’ve shifted how I think about my identity lately! I’m not ashamed of this aspect of myself. In fact, I wrote posts along those lines, posted them, *and then deleted them* more than once.

It wasn’t because I didn’t want to talk about disability. It was because I still wasn’t 100% sure if I was really allowed.

I hadn’t been working full-time for five years at this point. My disease affected my life every day and I was regularly excluded from participating in “normal” abled life. But was I disabled enough? Did it count since my disability was invisible? Did I know enough about the disability community to claim it as my own?

The world, after all, is so full of gatekeepers.

In the year since then, I haven’t done quite as much learning about disability as I might have hoped. When you’ve just entered a room, it’s worthwhile to find out what’s been happening and who’s been there before you showed up; I still have a lot to learn from disabled elders and teachers about what it means to share this identity and grow a more accessible world together.

But what I have learned is that disability is the largest and most diverse minoritized identity in the world. Everyone who lives long enough experiences temporary or permanent disability in some way. Disabilities are physical, psychological, and neurological, visible and invisible, painful and painless, born and made.

We are every kind of person, in every place. What we share is everything, and nothing, except the experience of being blocked by systems, structures, and cultures from participating in life with others in our particular bodies as we are.

We are the people coming to tear down the gates.

Claiming disability isn’t about claiming to speak for all disabled people. It’s not about adding a marginalized “tag” to my bio. It’s not about making nondisabled people feel weird or guilty around me.

Claiming disability happened in the middle of writing a book about honoring Jesus’s incarnation by trusting what my own body said to me. This body said, we are excluded, and that matters. This body said, justice for all is justice for me. This body said, disabled people are my kin.

It’s about accepting that there is a name for the experiences I’ve had; that there is a community with its own histories and cultures for people like me; about naming that my body and I are not “too fragile” or too needy or too complicated for this world, but—to the detriment of every single disabled and nondisabled person—this world is hostile to me. It’s about being in solidarity with the disabled community I had already formed with my many disabled friends and family members.

I’m grateful to Sins Invalid for coining the term “Disability Justice” and pointing out that true disability justice is necessarily intersectional—recognizing that we all live with many layers of privilege and marginalization across different aspects of our identities, and that true liberation asks us to attend most insistently to the most marginalized among us. I think this is a way Jesus teaches us. Disability is not a club for my own personal benefit, where I can create a little enclave of white, financially secure disabled people like me and call that justice.

But why would I want it to be such a club? Simply demanding access for myself sounds a little tiresome. It sounds suspiciously like the opposite of Disability Pride: like I’d really be pursuing the chance to seem “normal.” How boring. I’d rather pursue a radically accepting world where no one has to [pretend to] be “normal” to belong.

I’m proud of my disability. I’m proud of my sick body and my ill mind. I’m proud of my story. I’m proud of the ways I’ve learned to survive and thrive and love outside the bounds of what ableism rewards, celebrates, allows.

And I’m so deeply proud of my community, both the disabled folks I know and the global family of us. We are creative. We are resilient and powerful without having to pretend we’re unfailingly “strong.” We are honest. We are deeply interdependent. We are cultivating patience, kindness, listening, and joy. We are not leaving our bodies, or anyone’s body, behind. I believe this is the work of God.

The world has so very much to learn from our experiences and the ways we’ve learned to live; but not least from our ability to share political experiences and interests amidst incredible diversity. I meet so many people struggling to understand what true inclusivity really entails when we are all so different and need such different things; but disabled people and communities are teaching me the answers might be simpler than we believe.

Inclusivity means slowing down and simplifying. It means not assuming we know what people need. It means asking who’s not here and why. It means taking responsibility for ourselves by being honest and vulnerable. It means learning new rhythms if that’s what it takes to care for each other. It means letting some things be slightly uncomfortable or unfamiliar, because we don’t have to understand or enjoy everything and everyone before we can respect and honor them.

It means no one has to be centered, or leading, or talking, (or marginalized, following, or listening and deferring) all the time. We get to take turns. What a gift.

I’m proud to commit to solidarity, however imperfect, with people whose disabilities and lives are so very, very unlike mine. I’m proud to insist by their side—and with the God in whose image we’re made—that we are all allowed.

peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

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