Leah Lakshmi in Sins Invalid 2009 - Part 1

Описание: “Inspirational" disability narratives glamorize disabled people for their “bravery” in living in their bodyminds with: chronic pain, chronic illness, impairments, disorders, etc.

It’s as if disability and disablement are only worth talking about as barriers we’ve overcome.

In this performance, the illustrious Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work, The Future is Disabled, Bodymap, and more) talks about all the slow, tired, and grueling parts of being sick and disabled, and the grief for what we were supposed to be,

“like Zadie Smith or Saul Williams, famous and accomplished at 21 with a book or a CD or a spoken word celebrity. Instead, my early twenties went away. I spent them sleeping. 15, 17, 19 hours a day. That was my accomplishment.”

Leah’s performance is a cathartic account of how draining and tedious and dejecting it is to heal in a disabled bodymind.

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha performs in Sins Invalid 2009 at Brava Theater in San Francisco. Part 1 of 3.

Transcript below:

There's an underground river flowing through every queer of color community I've been a part of and kissed. The underground river of kids who went away. The girls and boys who got sick and tired, spent hours curled up sleeping . An underground river swelling its banks, filling the riverbed, carrying us away. Fibro, chronic fatigue, lyme disease, cancer, endo, Multiple Sclerosis, multiple chemical sensitivity. We were all just too sensitive. Fatigue too thick to make sense of phone, Trader Joe's, Laundromat, let alone meeting, party, dance floor. We go away.

Sick. Sick.
"you sick again, girl? you still in bed it's three in the afternoon! "

Shame makes our hips crumble to the floor, sticks us there.

There's an underground river that whispers: abuse survivors are the ones who get the weird diseases. Us whose bodies were raped and touched too young, us whose bodies tell terrible stories, horrible lies. Our bodies' walls cave in on the stories they hold that are too much, swell our banks in a flash flood. Leave us crumpled in sweatpants on our beds, vibrators always plugged in for pain control, herbal infusion in big mason jars, cell phone where we text our friends when our cognitive skills too gone to call, on hold for the low-income sliding scale queer acupuncture clinic, again. Sweating. Scared. Sometimes, you never see us again.

When I was in my early twenties I was supposed to be like Zadie Smith or Saul Williams, famous and accomplished at 21 with a book or a CD or a spoken word celebrity. Instead, my early twenties went away. I spent them sleeping. 15, 17, 19 hours a day. That was my accomplishment.

When I was in my early twenties I walked back into memory. Walked up the stairs of a one-bedroom apartment with a half-broken front door I could still lock. I wrote my parents my terrible story, stuck the envelope in the mailbox and walked away. I got tireder and tireder, like I had some Victorian wasting disease. Except that I wasn't Victorian, I was a light brown girl with old glasses, a bad haircut, and a sick and tired body.

All I could do was sleep, so that's what I did. I slept and I reknit. Surrendered and fell. On my futon, in the hours of lying down it took to make it to the bathroom, I found the stories that felt like river stones in my belly. I could touch their smooth grey chalk and whirlpool backs and know they were real. My terrible story, it was the medicine I would need, what had happened to me, what had happened. I chose to believe my terrible story.

And I healed. I healed true.