July never seemed so strange for disabled people...

...or for anyone else on the fringes of society forced to subsist under capitalism.

Complex emotions mar July’s ingress.

Instead of working on my presentation, I listen to The Decemberists’ July July as means to bring me back to centre. Every July, like clockwork, this song persists in my catalogue as one I revisit. While the lyrics seem elusive, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists posted his songwriting process and these stories are haunted. The imagery stretches forward to encompass the strangeness of July. I procrastinate my slides, I write more to process what I’m going through. I’m moving slower, with more intention. While I grieve the past, I reflect on how June progressed and how the emotions transferred to July.

This is the story of the road that goes to my house, and what ghosts there do remain.

Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

I spent most of June cooped up in my apartment trying to beat the heat while grieving over the unexpected and painful dissolution of a long-term partnership. While my peers and community were out in the streets protesting and fighting for our rights, I was too exhausted to join in the festivities. Continued existence through corporeal means under the current state of the world feels impossible.

I am a fat, disabled, neurodivergent queer non-binary person of colour who continues to deal with chronic illness management and wrapping my head around a diagnosis that can only arrive through laparoscopic surgery. Living life through any of these identities is difficult. My multiple intersections mean that society wants to see people like me dead.  However, I know that being alive is a form of resistance. The alternatives are severe marginalization, policing, and isolation. As a disabled person, I struggle with choosing rest because it doesn’t fit Western society’s utopian vision of capitalist individualism. And yet, I needed to if I wanted to continue living and resisting the way my peers did this past Pride. 

The choice to take up space as an outsider means people comment on your existence without your permission. Some of us carry intergenerational trauma, others experience discrimination. Society teaches our young to exist in a binary world when life does not exist in that manner. It is full of nuance, context and mess! That’s what makes it so beautiful. The types of care I envision helped me come home to my body. My body is my home, not anyone else’s. No one else has lived in my shoes and embodied this vessel, but I know people who exist under similar means and share my pain. 

And the water rolls the drain, the blood rolls down the drain. Oh what a lonely thing, in a blood-red drain. July, July, July— Never seemed so strange.

We are skilled at navigating a post-apocalyptic world. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the experience of living as queer, disabled, and neurodivergent. She mentions for those who exist between societal margins, it feels like living science-fiction. We will lead the revolution because we live in a world that doesn’t care. Mask bans to curb crime (according to some legislators and leaders) mean that we’re further diving into a police state, rather than the abolitionist futures we’re dreaming of.

This summer, I watched life spin around me. My peers toy with medical restrictions and access needs, and ignore both to further connection. I couldn’t go with my friend to a performance because he had COVID, and I was still concerned about my health. While we can’t exist in isolation forever, it still sucks. We’ve learned that a global pandemic turns into an endemic if abled, white bodies can survive. The abled world suffered with productivity under capitalism when mass death and trauma occurred and didn’t blink when Othered Bodies died or became even sicker.

The newest variant is called FLiRT. It’s a cute moniker, but horrible we can’t even use the Greek alphabet because of how many times it’s mutated. I’m worried about presenting a workshop on community care at a late summer gathering. Will it achieve the desired outcome? Will organizers be able to accommodate my access needs? Will I be able to interact and connect with others when I’m immuno-compromised? There are so many questions I have for the future. I’m stuck in limbo, helpless and hopeless to answer them.

And we’ll remember this when we are old and ancient, though the specifics might be vague.

I wonder what historians will write about this era. I wonder if we will survive parts of the apocalypse. I wonder how I can live in a sustainable way when the world feels like it doesn’t give a shit. We are trying to survive a world that doesn’t deem us worthy of life. Yet, we’re also pillaging and consuming Earth’s resources at a dangerous rate. We are not giving ourselves enough space, distance and time to heal ourselves and the Earth. Capitalism, a system built under white supremacy, threatens our livelihoods.

While I am anxious about the macro effects of individualism— I am grateful for the small moments of joy and happiness. During a crucial transition, it almost feels fraught to wish for them. I take time to divest from oppressive structures and give myself space to slow down— almost to a halt— to rest, resist, and reward myself for persisting. Community members are throwing COVID-cautious events, mutual aid groups that provide air purifiers for space in the name of clean air, and people still insist on masking while on public transportation or at events even when the rest of the world doesn’t.

July will always be strange when it’s the End Times.

Nevertheless, we persist. Because that’s what crip, mad people do. We may not always thrive, but we survive. With our help, of course. Not the oppressive powers that be. We thrive because our communities find small, actionable ways to show care to the utmost extent.

I hope that July won’t be as strange in the future. I want to dream and hope for the better for all of us. Maybe we’ll have to do that by remembering our effective interdependence and ability to work together rather than separating or dividing us.

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If you liked this, you might want to consider checking out The Midwest Love Fest 2024, on August 17, 2024, in Indianapolis. I will be presenting a workshop using disability and transformative justice frameworks and concepts, and applying them to alternative relationship structures and how to re-envision and dream of the care we’ve always wanted.

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Please come check us out and get 10% off registration with my code ‘CHRISTALEI', or sign up to volunteer and you can come for free!

Thank you all so much for your time, energy and support. I’m grateful you continue to read, even if my updates are infrequent. I promised to not write anything new, but this had to come out.

Sorry it’s so late and have a wonderful rest of your weekend x