![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Atlanta portion of my Rammstein adventure is currently barreling towards eight thousand words. Who knew I had so much to say about a bookstore, a restaurant, and a train station, but it appears I do. If I'm honest, it's about those places, yes, but it's also about a hundred other things, about hope and fear and happiness and finding your balls and humiliation and the utter, grinding exhaustion of how Disabled People Do Things. Of how we have to do things because this country isn't willing to recognize the vast gulf between its rhetoric and its reality. It's about bathrooms and restaurants and train stations and deprivation and struggling to meet a goal and fulfill a dream because right now, the dream is all you have left, and goddamn, but it had better be worth the thick, stinking, burning, undiluted piss sluicing between your legs and your empty stomach and your cracked lips and raw toes, because if it's not... Oh, if it's not.
The posts on this trip will be entirely public, and I will absolutely not apologize for them. If you're one of those bothersome pollyanna life coaches who think I'm too "negative", these will not be the posts for you, and if while reading them, you are overcome by the impulse to tell me that I shouldn't let my disability define me so, don't. You can think it all you please, and you can say so in your own Internet space, but until you've spent a week in a wheelchair being totally at the mercy of another human being and rolling block after block after block without finding an accessible toilet that was actually accessible, you don't get to come into my Internet bathroom and tell me that being disabled, I'm doing it wrong.
There's a lot of hope and joy and wonder in these posts, too, and I hope that comes through as well, but everything I've written about, for better or worse, is true. I don't care if it makes you uncomfortable. I don't have to make you feel comfortable about my life and how I have to live it. If it squicks you or chaps your ass to know exactly how I have to pee in public, then stop reading. I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to tell you how it is. I don't care if you can deal with it, because I have to, and I'll be damned if I'll pretend I don't.
It won't be much longer, and for what it's worth, I hope you enjoy it.
The posts on this trip will be entirely public, and I will absolutely not apologize for them. If you're one of those bothersome pollyanna life coaches who think I'm too "negative", these will not be the posts for you, and if while reading them, you are overcome by the impulse to tell me that I shouldn't let my disability define me so, don't. You can think it all you please, and you can say so in your own Internet space, but until you've spent a week in a wheelchair being totally at the mercy of another human being and rolling block after block after block without finding an accessible toilet that was actually accessible, you don't get to come into my Internet bathroom and tell me that being disabled, I'm doing it wrong.
There's a lot of hope and joy and wonder in these posts, too, and I hope that comes through as well, but everything I've written about, for better or worse, is true. I don't care if it makes you uncomfortable. I don't have to make you feel comfortable about my life and how I have to live it. If it squicks you or chaps your ass to know exactly how I have to pee in public, then stop reading. I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to tell you how it is. I don't care if you can deal with it, because I have to, and I'll be damned if I'll pretend I don't.
It won't be much longer, and for what it's worth, I hope you enjoy it.
Tags: