Sunflower Punk’s guest article covers her life-long struggle with chronic pain, living 6 years with an untreated broken ankle, doctors blaming her health problems on her weight, inaccessible housing, and juggling all of those while also raising a kid as a single mom. It’s worth a read as is her follow up post today.
Category: Voices
A collection of personal stories and anecdotes showing the ways oppression affects us on a day to day basis, as well as our reactions to it.
Look for opportunities to submit your story to this segment in the near future.
Could It Be My Birth Control?: The Intrauterine Diaries
Today’s guest post is for anyone who has struggled with unpleasant symptoms and body changes and wondered to themselves, could it be my birth control? This post is even more for you if this question was met with dismissal and doubts when brought to medical professionals, which is unfortunately too common of a pattern.
What’s Living with Celiac Disease Like?
Though I’ve never been formally diagnosed, my symptoms match the condition of celiac disease so well that it’s the easiest way to communicate my level of gluten-sensitivity to a stranger. But of course, my experiences living with celiac disease didn’t start when I cut out gluten. They started when I was a child with no idea what was making me sick.
Windows: Snippets from a Mind Struggling with PTSD, Anxiety, and Depression
I spent more than a year searching for the reason that despite multiple skilled therapists and a wonderful social support system, I was still struggling with PTSD to the point that it was debilitating. I wrote this piece prior to my diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but now it reads like a textbook list of the symptoms.
A Day in the Life of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome
While scrolling through twitter, I found a fellow EDS disability advocate had created a thread detailing what it was like to live a day in the life of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I was inspired to write my own account, to make visible all the tiny little adjustments I make all day long to live with this condition.
Guest Post on ‘Splain You a Thing: Why It’s Hard to Reveal My Disability to Strangers
To make sure you all continue to have something to read during my writing hiatus, I’m happy to present to you a guest post I wrote for the social justice blog, ‘Splain You A Thing.
What Ableism Feels Like
I became disabled late in life, at which point I had to completely restructure my mental understanding of what to expect of my body. I was also introduced to the world of ableism. Ableism had been happening all around me but it wasn’t until I was disabled that I had any idea what ableism feels like.
How Did You Meet Your Abusive Partner?
Most abusive relationship stories lie in the story of how you left: How did you get out? What was the final straw? How awful did things have to get before you finally had enough? When it comes to abusive relationships, no one ever asks, How did you two get together? How did you meet your abusive partner?
New Clothes: Disability Accommodation & Body Acceptance
This article captures a moment in time when I was going to start receiving financial support, which granted me the freedom to focus on ways I could implement disability accommodation into my life, instead of always fighting back.
The Blue Book: The First Time I Learned About Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome
When my physical therapist gave me a book about ehlers danlos syndrome, I thought I would be reading about joint instability but this book wasn’t just about my pain problems. The book contained a list of every serious health problem I had ever had in my life, and potentially, a reason why they were connected.