Wednesday’s Wednesdays and Finally..On A Wednesday!

I’ve done it, I officially met my fundraising goal a few days ago. I now have enough money to buy the plane tickets that will take me to and from MIT for the DIS summit, thanks to a supportive family and good friends I have the opportunity to meet people in my community face to face this coming October and I am absolutely ecstatic! This will be my first out of state trip I’ve ever taken on my own, the experience will be entirely new.
For those of you who don’t know what the DIS summit is, this paragraph is taken directly from their page on the Awesome Foundation’s website: “ The Disability & Intersectionality Summit (DIS) is a biennial one-day conference that centers the experiences and knowledge of multiply marginalized disabled people such as, queer disabled people of color, undocumented transgender disabled people, or formerly incarcerated disabled people among others. This conference serves as a platform to highlight the multiple oppressions that shape the lived experiences of disabled individuals, as told by disabled people, in a setting organized by disabled activists.”
So what does this have to do with me, why am I so excited about this and who the hell am I anyway?
As a disabled woman I have only been active in within the larger disabled community for about two years now, most of that time has been spent researching our history and our progress. I was interested in understanding my own experience from the perspective of someone who I thought would know more about it than I do but as it turns out I have just as much knowledge of that story I’m looking for as anyone else in the community does. Something that binds us together and pushes us forward is a sense of connection that as a whole, most of us are fighting for the same thing. I want my lifetime. Whatever that means, but I want it without having to ask for handouts from people who are healthier, taller, prettier, “better” than me. I want to be able to go to the store and get groceries with money I earned from working a decent job in an environment that treats me with the same dignity and respect granted to my non-disabled peers. I want to be able to get married/move out of my parent’s house without fear of losing my health insurance or being trapped in a system that treats me and others like me as though our lives do not hold value and because we dared to ask for help from the same society that repeatedly tells us that we SHOULD ask for that help. I want to be seen as someone who is worth something (even to myself) without having to constantly prove that worth in order to have my basic needs met or in order for me to enjoy a decent life, and one that I get to choose. I want my voice to be heard. I want equality and all of these things have pushed me these past few years to start voicing my opinions, to speak up when it matters and to attend conferences/summits like the one happening in October.
My work as an activist is what has led me to talk about my experiences. I want to push the perspective, before I started getting involved I had no interest in activism. The idea that being “another disabled activist” was the only thing that people would remember about me after I had passed on was terrifying and it still is but that is even more of a reason to do this work.
I think we can change the narrative, so.. I am another disabled activist and that is only one side of the story, I am also human and it is for that part of the story that I continue to write.
