Personal Stories

The loss of Stella Young, a prominent 32 year old disability activist, writer, and comedian this weekend will leave a considerable gap in the landscape of disability advocates. Whilst those who knew the young woman personally will undoubtedly feel her loss, so too, will the great number of young disabled …

Introduction A week ago, I returned home from a guide dog school in the American south with a terrific new black labrador named Jackson. This essay describes the process one goes through to retire an older dog and to get a new one and the emotional roller coaster ride I’ve …

I’m on a new medication as of July. It’s working really well, only after I was on it for a few weeks, I started to have a lot of muscle stiffness, cramping and spasticity, including pharyngeolaryngeal pain. A lot more than usual. This is part and parcel to my underlying …

TW for discussion and details of sexual assault. I wrote this post a while back as a guest post.  When I was 18, I was assaulted by a doctor at the university clinic. I had gone in to get tested for bacterial vaginosis. I was in love and wanted to …

TW: self harm, suicide, depression, forced institutionalization, abuse. (author’s note: I have to be honest, I wrote the first draft of this blog post several weeks ago but had so much trouble bringing myself to proofread it that I’ve just been sitting on it ever since. Writing this proved to …

If you’ve read my disability story, you know that I wasn’t always as sick as I am now. It was a gradual process at first that sped up around the time when I had surgery. Since I grew up in Wisconsin, went to college in Iowa, and then moved to Ohio …

Imagine you’re making a soup. You’ve never tried any vegetables or meat before, and while you’re preparing the soup, a gremlin keeps adding all this salt. You don’t really know what salt tastes like, and you haven’t added any yourself. When you go to try the soup, it’s far too …

First World Solutions I’ve seen the featured image show up on my facebook feed a few times now. The featured image states, “Annual deaths caused by the [sic] ALS: 5,600. Annual deaths caused by lack of access to clean water: 3,400,000.” The text is superimposed over an image of a …

When I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, I had never even heard of it before. In the 2 1/2 years since then, I’ve made quite a few friends who also have Crohn’s Disease. It’s nice to have a group of friends who have the same disease you do, and thanks …

On June 26th, I had my gallbladder removed in an attempt to lessen the frequency with which I get pancreatitis. For those unfamiliar, pancreatitis is a condition where for some reason, bile and digestive enzymes back up into the pancreas causing inflammation and pain. In a colloquial sense, my pancreas …