Andrea McDowell

“Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“It isn’t just racism. Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification. The system itself becomes the abuser. When my boss said I was “different,” I thought it meant broken. Now I think it meant something else.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“The goal is not to avoid falling or needing help. The goal is to be seen, asked, heard, believed, valued as we are, allowed to exist in these exact bodies, invited to the party, and encouraged to dance however we want to.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“A world built on speed, productivity, more, more, more! and far too few bathrooms (and bathroom breaks) does not consider or care for the actual bodies we live in. In other words, ableism affects all of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or not.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body