Living with Cerebral Palsy and Intersectionality

Recently, I watched the 2024 film Out of My Mind about a young girl with Cerebral Palsy who couldn't speak or walk. There's definitely challenges there that I don't face because I can walk and speak, but the movie hit on some important points and invoked a lot of emotions.  The battle to be heard when you have a disability, whether you can speak or you can't, is very real. Without spoiling too much of the film, which you can watch on Disney sources, there's a couple of scenes that I'm going to pay attention to here.  First, in an early scene, Melody's goldfish jumps out of the tank, but she can't communicate that, and so it looks like she just made a big mess. She tried to communicate to the best of her abilities using the tools she had, but her dad didn't want to hear it.  I found my blood boiling watching that scene. I could feel what it felt like to be misunderstood and unheard. And I think this was important because her parents were her biggest a...

Glass half full or half empty? Fuck the glass. It just doesn't work like that for me. It's neither, it's both, the glass has broken, and I carry the gifts of fullness and despair. “When everything's made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am” (Goo Goo Dolls, Iris, 1998). I haven't given up on the pursuit of wanting you to know who I am for over four decades because there's something deeper than the glass in my head.  It's not easy to wake up in my body or even my mind every day. It's not choice and it is choice. It's not resilience and it is resilience. It's for sure survival. “Ain't it funny how the night moves?” Yes, Bob Segar, it is funny how the night moves in waves of flashbacks of full and empty, good and bad, love and loss. It's not my aim to speak in riddles but to paint a picture of why I bluntly forego the glass, of why I want you to know who I am, of why the battle inside makes not giving up both a goal and an obstacle...