Darby High

“Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“But that's the thing - outsiders lump kids with CP under the same umbrella, and that's another umbrella under the enormous parasol of congenital disorders, which sits under the gargantuan black canopy of disability. We're sorted into categories, but we can be nothing alike. I don't even mean how some of us are hemiplegic and others are paraplegic, or how some of us are spastic and others aren't, or some of us have learning disabilities and others don't. I mean on a perso al level, we're all different people.
That should be obvious right?
Camp Wigwah is where I realized my disability is like any other part of a person - eyes or ears or teeth or height - and that it's a variable. I have poor eyesight, and the muscles on my right side are tense threads that make my knees collide. But Karen Yuen's in a wheelchair, and Ali Sniridan spasms every evening.
I started thinking of CP as a part of me, and I stopped resenting it so much. It seems dumb to ask your eye color to change. An AFO isn't bad when you think of it like a pair of glasses. I love my glasses; they're one fashion accessory that demands no explanation.
That's how the space brace came about. Mom and Tamara were trying to make me love myself. But it's harder when it's someone else's decision.”
― Leah Thomas, Wild and Crooked

“There're always more truths than one. Knowing who I am, or thinking I might know? That's only half a truth. Because my identity will always be halfway informed by the world. It has to be informed by something. Usually we define ourselves by loving things, Doc Martens or Shakespeare or music or whatever. But if the things we love are other people, those people define us. And then they're a part of you, and they change what you know about yourself.”
― Leah Thomas, Wild and Crooked