for queer disabled people of color craving community with each other:

the azolla is a southeast asian plant used in growing rice. azolla plants carry the ability to grow quickly, suppress weeds, and give nutrients to other plants in a symbiotic fashion. the azolla has millions of small, overlapping leaves and lives on the surface of water with its roots hanging under the surface.

we, as disabled queer people of color, are the azolla. we are everywhere. we have the power to grow and build community (the azolla can double its biomass in 2 days!) we are beautiful. we give nutrient to those around us but either are invisible or called weeds. although we sustain community, the focus is never on us. we are working on creating a space, the Azolla Story, that changes this.

we want this online home to be a space where we can connect with each other; build knowledge and community; share stories and histories; reflect, support and transform our love for and with each other. we are a part of many communities and seek to build a community where we can claim our whole selves. we recognize that queerness, gender expression and identity, trans politics and sexuality are an important part of our lives because of the many ways that queer disabled people of color’s gender, sexuality and relationships are policed, deamonized, ignored, exterminated and exploited.

we hope you will grow with us and join us in the telling of our transformation(s). this is the azolla story.

if you are interested in joining the azolla story online community, pls leave a comment and i will send you a link.

“intersectionality” is not
the sprinkling of
my people
into your analysis

it swallows you
like water folding over rock
and those pretty smooth pebbles you like to collect?
those are all pieces of my life

–
i have a growing inability to take people who throw around the word “intersectionality” seriously. it is becoming a problem: we’ll be in a meeting and the future of feminism, disability rights or what have you will pop up and soon someone is dropping the word intersectionality and looking at me as a woman of color for back up

but, you do not know what intersectionality is. intersectionality is something so expansive so broad so deeply rooted in my existence that i cannot sum it up into a single word and then toss it around like a ball.

“intersectionality” is not simply the meeting place of single issue politics. it is something where pieces of our experiences are so intertwined and so entangled together that they cannot be pulled apart into strands.

the way you treat intersectionality is like asking me to look up in the sky and pinpoint where the clouds begin and end.

–
had this in the drafts folder and posted it after reading my friend mia’s blog post titled: “intersectionality is a big fancy word for my life”. go read.

(this post begins with a poem that may be triggering.)

left to my own devices, i make myself write poems.

pls help me

ableism makes it impossible to have space where i can talk about physical pain i feel. if you say you are hurting, you are in pain, you are not feeling control over your own body, they combine that with mainstream ableist notions of disability and use that to justify stealing your self-determination from you.

i cannot talk about pain or feelings of powerlessness openly with friends either. it seems like my community depends on me to be this picture of strength and power. especially disabled people. somehow my queer, shittalking, consumerist/shopaholic, bossy ways has turned me into this larger-than-life persona of someone who is proud, loves her body, has a lot of love interests, and always knows what she wants and gets it. even though i tell people that this is just an image, that i am shaped by insecurity and full of frustration, there is still this expectation of not having fear or weakness. as if i wasn’t taurus enough already.

the truth is that chronic pain makes me feel powerless. poetry sometimes helps me retrieve power. the other night i decided i was going to force myself to write poetry because even though i was tired, it would distract me from my pain. i wrote until my eyes were heavy with sleep. sleep was my goal. it worked.

poetry is a distraction from pain and a journey into it; a companion and a place of solitude; a system of pain management and medicine you create for yourself ; a reminder that your body is your own and acknowledgement that there is little we can actually control

i love poetry because i can just be.

soon everything will erupt soon everything will release and soon there will be a downpour
so loud so intense you are not sure what the outcome will be
but somewhere in there is a quiet that comes
a quiet that is gentle enough for sleep
help me get to that place, poetry

body betraying me,
one simple miscalculation of gravity
has always brought
this body
crashing
to
the
ground.

never letting my love for you slip out,
i tiptoe around us delicately
push/ pull back/ pretend
like i don’t care pretend like this is a seat
at the bus station a temporary reprieve
not what we have chosen
for ourselves

forever fearing the eventual misstep
i’m
falling
falling
falling
crashing to the ground

as someone who is a disability community builder (think potlucks, youth training programs, etc) a good chunk of my time is spent creating space and relationships where people are working through their disability identity for the first time. much of this is done by talking about our social positioning and the ways our lives are similarly shaped by ableism. pretty soon, it is easy enough to connect shared values, experiences, and history and point out that we share a culture of disability. i love the word disability culture because it describes the indescribable & recognizes that which is supposed to be left unspoken: the commonality you can only find among other outsiders, the sigh of relief that comes with realizing you don’t have to “pass” or make yourself least disabled as possible here, letting ourselves be loud, clanky, take up space, etc.

last night i had a 2 hour skype conversation with someone who not only has the same politic i do, but also has a similar disability to mine. in my disability organizing, it has somehow become common for me to be the only wheelchair user in a space and i forgot how goooooood it feels to be with someone that deals with the exact. same. shit. i. do.  my body is going through a lot of change right now and i am starting to recognize that my visually impaired, autistic, or Deaf guy friends will never be able to help me understand my changing body in that same way that a (queer) woman (of color) with a mobility impairment can. a little surprised that this is something i have let myself forget… it is the reason i believe in community and why i work so hard to find ways for other disabled people to have “OMG you have that experience too??” moments

i’m also realizing that not allowing space in cross-disability work to recognize that our experiences are *not* the same has been a great disservice to us all. i know when i am using the term “people of color”, i have to recognize that my experience as mixed asian woman is vastly different from that of a black or latino brother so it is strange to me that this understanding doesn’t transfer into my disability work. my friends and i have spent so much energy this year fighting/crying/being let down around accommodations and access that i am seeing the way that maybe this is connected to our inability to hold a space that says our experiences with disability are different and that what it takes for us to participate in a space is different.

it seems like with everything else about disability, this space is a balance, an art. i do not believe in coalition-based thinking (over community-based thinking) because i’ve seen the way that it has meant disabled people only caring about their individual disability issues and fighting for their piece of the pie instead of working for us all getting free. at the same time, i have to be able to recognize that our experiences are different and that multiple kind of spaces are necessary…

this month i am spending a third of my days travelling and sleeping in hotels. all of this is taking a toll on my body and i find myself stepping back and wondering why movements i could do the day before are not possible (i keep thinking: “ohmygosh this HAS to be what muscular dystrophy is supposed to feel like”, hehe). on monday, i was in raleigh going down a hill i’ve been down a million times before. the possibility of losing my balance and tumbling out of my chair was such a real danger that i had to call a friend nearby to come walk with me. (and it’s a good thing i called him, not only was my body draining but my chair died and he had to push me back to the hotel.)

i am thinking constantly about the contradiction and the space between wanting to live a disability justice lifestyle — desperately wanting to dismantle capitalist rules of productivity that leave out many of us and force us to give up our bodies and our labor for nothing that frees our communities— but also finding my life very rooted in a disability rights assimilationist model— i can do anything this other person can do, just need the right accomodations, just need more opportunities/laws/connections, just need to work harder… it took me 7 days of working in my first job to realize that no, i am not miraculously more productive than other disabled people in the organization, things were getting done because i had put in 80+ hours the first week to prove i was of value… funny thing is the only one in the org i ever needed to prove this to was myself.

and i have found that when i am at home, working part of the day from bed is the only thing that doesn’t tear apart my body. but feeling well is hard to exchange for the fact that i type much slower in bed, that it takes me twice as long to do what i can do sitting up. i hate how that feels but i am trying to challenge myself to not just to talk about disability justice but live it— self care, interdependent relationships, questioning a system that asks me to give up my body/labor and otherizes me if i cannot. but it is hard.

this tied in with a few other things also has me thinking about what i know intellectually, what i know with my heart, what i know with my body. where those 3 things meet and what they look like. where desire, safety, intimacy fits in. it is all really confusing and i get lost easily.

here is to us finding wellness and joy in 2010. here is to listening to your body.