Quotes from Alice Wong

Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we're doing, is not the only possibility. —Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)

I don't understand it," I continued. "These things, they just keep happening, and I know it has to mean something. It has to. I want my suffering to mean something. I want this pain to matter.

Storytelling can be more than a blog post, essay, or book. It can be an emoji, a meme, a selfie, or a tweet. It can become a movement for social change.

Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story—my story. But I guess that's how life works sometimes—noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.

This may feel true for every era, but I believe I am living in a time where disabled people are more visible than ever before. And yet while representation is exciting and important, it is not enough. I want and expect more. We all should expect more. We all deserve more.

A brain injury is a particularly hard injury to have because it changes who you are in ways that other injuries don't, since it affects how you think, act, and respond. It's hard to talk about that loss and grief with people who have never experienced it.

Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing," says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

We should not make disabled lives subject to debate

These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. Disability Visibility is also one part of a larger arc in my own story as a human being.

I feel a little bitter that most non-disabled people do not have this dilemma of whether they will exchange their privacy to be seen as human. I am also aware that I am not alone in this experience, and that many marginalized people are put in the position of having to prove their humanity every day.

Good shit takes time. Extend time, bend time, crip time.

After a decade of all-volunteer advocacy, I have come to view every incarceration as a missed opportunity to love and transform; as a loss of time, life, and dreams of our community; and as state violence. Some of our greatest assets and resources in this struggle are exiled from our communities and languishing in this nation's labyrinth of violent institutions.

IHS is also grossly underfunded: in 2016, Congress allotted $4.8 billion for IHS, which came out to approximately $1,297 per person.

For a government that claims to seek to reduce and prevent violence, transformative and holistic measures like community conversations and community accountability should be at least a part of the solution.

I took a deep breath and—alongside the oxygen and the carbon dioxide—I exhaled tidbits of the intense shame and fear that I had carried as an extra weight on my backbone.

You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You're expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone's pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally.

Internalized ableism is so hard to overcome partially because those beliefs are so often reinforced in society. It's not just in our heads. It's in our daily lives and experiences...and then it gets in our heads.

Jessie Lorenz talked with her friend Herb Levine about his involvement in the 1977 504 sit-ins—the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was a federal law that outlawed discrimination based on disability in any program or activity receiving federal funding.

Stuttering is only a problem–in fact is only abnormal–because our culture places so much value on efficiency and self-mastery. Stuttering breaks communication only because ableist notions have already decided how fast and smooth a person must speak to be heard and taken seriously. An arbitrary line has been drawn around "normal" speech, and that line is forcefully defended.

I want to disrupt what's thought of as the default public radio voice. I want to challenge listeners as they ride the subway, jog on their treadmills, and drive on their commute. Even if the sounds and words we create might require greater concentration and attention, I believe our stories are worth the effort.

Role models create unrealistic expectations and an asymmetrical power dynamic; role models or icons can do more harm than good because they obscure the flaws and contradictions we all have.

Even the notion of "quality of life" as a measurable standard is based on assumptions that a "good" healthy life is one without disability, pain, and suffering. I live with all three intimately, and I feel more vital than ever at this point in time because of my experiences and relationships. Vulnerable "high-risk" people are some of the strongest, most interdependent, and most resilient people around.

Being vulnerable, as well as honest, is the key to collective liberation. This is one thing I understand from the principles of disability justice. It is not something that happens overnight after buying a candle, listening to a podcast, or reading a memoir. It requires daily intentions, self-reflections, and support from the people who care about you.

How does capitalism pit groups that receive care against groups that provide care while it profits and exploits both?