#disablity

The building my favorite coffee shop is in is older, like most of the downtown buildings, and doesn't have a door button, but I'm lucky enough to be able to get up and open it when needed. I'm getting decent at steering on sidewalks but inside is a little harder. I kind of whacked myself with the coffee shop door, but the usual worker who always says hi to me by name came to help out and even though I felt exposed at being more noticeable, offering to help was the only acknowledgement he gave (I have been there with my cane lots before). I only ran into one guy's chair, and when you're awkward, apologetic, and noticeably disabled, reasonable people don't tend to get too annoyed about that

My plan was to do some sketching or reading or writing, just sort of chill with coffee, but then my friend texted me that she and her wife were going to the little tiny community-run Pride event (no corporations, no cops, there were only like 10 booths total and the only official organizations seemed to be charities and the public library). Now, this was happening in what I consider sort of the other town center, back past my house and almost as far again in the other direction. I would normally have never been up for this after going out one place without driving, especially in summer. But I was testing the usefulness of a new mobility aid, so I decided to risk it

Good things about the trip include: I wasn't exhausted and struggling to move in the heat, I wasn't worried about getting dizzy but (to my actual surprise) I also just didn't, and meandering through neighborhoods listening to audio dramas was quite pleasant

Bad things about the trip include: sidewalks can be inaccessible in some unexpected ways, although I'm not embarrassed at being disabled being observed in public makes me feel like you're turning my skin inside out and this makes that more likely, and my cup holder was intended for things larger than a 12-ounce cup so the top came off and my Americano sloshed all over my brand new skirt

My friends are good friends and so of course I was more awkward about this as a new situation than they were, but we looked at all the booths, the library ladies gave me a temporary tattoo, and then we went and had a lovely cup of coffee and chat in a nearby shop where I got to see all kinds of cool Pride aesthetics (I was wearing an ice cream skirt and Furiosa shirt because I wasn't planning on going to a Pride thing and also need to do laundry)

I did have to take a detour coming home because although I made it down the hill ok it was too steep for me to feel safe going up, but that was fine because I was just exploring with my story in no rush

When I got home I felt sooooo much better that I usually would have. I still retreated to the air conditioned bedroom to cool off and chill because outside was very bright and nearly 90, but I didn't feel like I had to lie down until I could walk again, which has happened without me even leaving my neighborhood on a hot day much less a 4-mile round trip! I didn't feel gross at all other than being a little overstimulated and sticky

...this feels like when I started using my cane for dizziness and discovered that it helped with standing baseline balance and fatigue also. Who knew, mobility aids actually aid me!

Introduction

[feelings] are "a consistent affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world."

**can this relate to Donna Haraway's porousness?

"physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language."

"if pain had a goal, it would be to be felt and known exclusively in its intensity."

Five sources for ways of knowing pain:

Individuals in pain themselves

Doctors attempting to diagnose and treat pain

Public, non-medical contexts of accounts of the pain of others (e.g. Amnesty International documents on torture)

Courtroom documents ("the lawyer, too, becomes an inventor of language, one who speaks on behalf of another person (the plaintiff) and attempts to communicate the reality of that person’s physical pain to people who are not themselves in pain (the jurors).")

Art

"the assumption that the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain."

"even the artist—whose lifework and everyday habit are to refine and extend the reflexes of speech—ordinarily falls silent before pain."

"the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented."

"It is not simply accurate but tautological to observe that given any two phenomena, the one that is more visible will receive more attention."

Part I. Chapter 1 is about torture ("uncovering the perceptual processes that permit this misdescription" of torture as information-gathering). Chapter 2 is about war.

"To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt. But we will see that the relation between pain and belief is even more problematic than has so far been suggested."

"The failure to express pain—will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power;"

"Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives, one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and (as V. C. Medvei noted in his 1948 treatise on pain11) almost immediately encounters an “as if” structure: it feels as if . . .; it is as though. . . . On the other side of the ellipse there reappear again and again (regardless of whether the immediate context of the vocalization is medical or literary or legal) two and only two metaphors, and they are metaphors whose inner workings are very problematic."

Part II. "The discussion of civilization’s ongoing modifications of “agency”"

"Physical pain—[...] is language-destroying."

"because “the structure of war” and “the structure of unmaking” are not two subjects but one."

"Chapter 3 attends specifically to “mental imagining” (or what was a moment ago called the phase of “making-up”), and Chapters 4 and 5 together examine the action of creating verbal and material artifacts..."

"The vocabulary of “creating,” “inventing,” “making,” “imagining,” is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: “imagining,” for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon;"

** the politics of imagining**

꒰ ◞ ◟ ꒱ㅤㅤㅤ dissociation flag

━╋━━━━ ㅤㅤㅤ a flag — created by me based on my own experiences — intended to represent dissociation. ㅤㅤㅤ ◞◟ ㅤㅤㅤ the appearance is intended to reflect the feeling of dissociation itself — the colours primarily representing the " dullness " or lack of " realness " of the world , and the blurriness primarily represents the feeling that the world or yourself are " blurry. " i see no issue with different interpretations based on the user's personal experiences , though. ㅤㅤㅤ ✶