It’s a subject that even my own audience has the least interest in engaging with. Disability, debility, the sacrifices required to maintain ruins in ruin. There is a widespread social consensus to move with and towards the fascistic promise of a return to an idealized past.

It is a subject that demands agitation. That I want to scream about so loudly. But my voice is so much weaker these days. I might only be able to raise it once or twice a month. It’s hard to bleed out to communicate something desperate and precious to a (relative) silence.

This isn’t a plea to read more of my stuff. it’s just. invisible illness and pain is a headtrip. i want it to be as real to other people as it is to me. i want people to look at my work and, in knowing my context, see the steep price paid like i do when i see it.

A thorough essay, for example, is a significant effort for anyone! But what it costs for an able bodied comrade to write one. and what it costs for someone like me, with chronic jaw, neck, and back pain, a damaged shoulder labrum, and an autoimmune disease, is just so different.

But on the screen, in your downloads folder, on a zine on a table, in a podcast, whatever. it looks the same. in many ways reads the same. and the meaningful ways they don’t read the same won’t register with a vast majority of those who engage with it.

and the able bodied comrade can get a lot more essays out there. show up to a lot more events. maintain and bolster social connections with other creatives that protects them and keeps their work centered in the interest of the milieu.

is the able bodied comrade doing anything wrong? in this very general example, no. Is anyone doing anything wrong? i don’t know. it is wrong how and what labor is invisibilized. but idk how to call attention when i don’t know how to articulate a counter strategy. i’m mostly sad.

i obviously have much more visibility than many other people! disabled and not! however complicated “visibility” may be for me (& that it’s visibility through anonymity) it means that as long as i can still create safely under this name, I’ll likely have an audience for my work.

that’s huge (and still a pleasant, if sometimes complicated, surprise!) and i don’t want to obfuscate that! i feel really lucky in that. i know a lot of truly talented and smart people who should have heaps of praise but haven’t gotten lucky in the social media game like i have.

but yeah as a creative running a large platform for a few years, publishing essays for a few years, developing an anti-ableist analysis, etc. i am pondering the longer trajectory differences over time between me and my more able bodied comrades who have been doing similar things.

In an attempt to bring it back to my earlier point, right, is that I think this is in part due to ability and capacity (who can produce, how much, and enough to maintain interest) and divergence in values re: ableism. They sting in their own ways.

Getting pushed, dragged, kicked further into the margins forces one to theorize those margins and all the shoves that pushed one there. That theorizing complicated by the reality of being pushed *from* an above *to* a below that other people have been occupying all their lives.

But the theory of the margins has much diminished mass appeal. This dynamic plays out in radical milieus regardless of proclaimed values of theoretical robustness! Bc the very structure of most social activity rn normalizes ableist violence, demands it.

What I am trying to work out here, with clarity or not, is how to make the invisible not only visible but an *agitant.* How to do that from the sickbed. how can labor be visible on a page? In a conflict of extreme asymmetry, what leverage can make a whisper register as a scream?

cohesive piece or not, i’m going to leave off this thread and see if i can put this small but so far steady little writing impulse into something more lasting than a twitter thread. i think being sad here about it first actually put me in the right frame of mind 🙏🩵