Welcome

“Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.”

“Shame can be sneaky. It tries to tell you that you are not good enough. My personal experience with a chronic illness allows for special empathy and compassion for those who experience chronic illnesses or pain.”

“Losing you,” she said, her dark eyes searching his face. “To you, Nena died. To her, you left. Those are two very different griefs.”

“I came to the realisation that it was impossible to change my environment. I decided to try and change myself instead.”

“A person who talks so freely about her own life will talk just as freely about yours.”

“To me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks - because they're equally important and interdependent.”

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”

“It is unbearable—and yet I bear it.”