My Reflection

Who am I?
I,
I’m my thoughts,
My dreams,
My aspirations.
I’m my name,
My looks,
My imagination.
That’s what I see,
When I stare,
Into my reflection.

My reflection,
Ripples in the river of life,
The shallow,
Shallow river of life.
To the world,
I am my reflection:
I am only what the world sees,
Only what the world decides I am.
My body is but a vessel;
Why must the world ignore me,
But acknowledge the vessel?!

Books, merely objects
Are still judged 
By only their covers,
So who am I to demand
They not judge me
By only what they can see.
The inside of a book
Is where the value lies
But most people don’t bother;
It’s easier to judge
From the outside

My body is a part of me,
It embodies my soul
My personality,
But it is not all I am.
I am not my scars,
My disability,
I am me,
A completely separate entity.
I, Me,
Not just what you see

The Safe Space

In class, we were learning about experience, about phenomenology. I understood that with our experiences we add in our senses (taste, touch, sight, hearing). I was honestly stumped on what I could talk about. I know that I have many different experience as a woman. But then I started to think about a specific place that made me feel safe…

As a woman, I feel the constant stress of my body. But I’m not just any woman, I am a brown woman. The pressures of having to keep my grades up or being the perfect brown daughter who lives up to her parent’s expectations. Where would I go to decompress my feelings of doubt and anxiety? Where could I go to make the world go slow for a moment of peace and quiet? The Women’s Center. A home away from home. I can imagine the structure of the room as my safe space. You enter a room filled with posters of colorful affirmations, handouts of mental health awareness. Seeing the names and faces of those who work in the center makes it all that encompassing. I am always greeted with a welcoming smile by the wonderful staff who are ready to care for you. I see a prayer room for those who have no place to go, another for mothers to feed their children. I look to my right and see the many forms of aid. Did you get your period? Take a tampon or pad. As many as you need because your body, your UTERUS, is cared for in this center. Are you sexually active? Go ahead and take some condoms for protection because no one wants any STDs. Coziness is an understatement as you walk further into their center. The round table, to sit and do work or to relax while playing with a fidget toy from the fidget bowl. The hugging of many bookshelves enriched with stories of colored women, LGBTQ+ personas finding themselves, and in those books, a voice that comforts you. A “You are not alone” “You are accepted for who you are” here and there is what you’ll find. Towards the back of the room, soft couches for you to sit down and relax your aching womanly body. My curvy body type just melting away into the cushion, holding me and letting me rest. Are you hungry? Take a bag of chips from the food shelves. No one’s going to judge how you eat or how much. You won’t be judged for being a skinny to thick body type. Every woman is welcome here at the center. I was always scared to enter this environment not knowing that it was so peaceful.

 Why didn’t I take the risk of pushing that door open my freshman year? Maybe it was the fear of other women judging me because they felt it was their own space. Was it was the unknown territory that frightened me to my core? Or my shyness because of the people who worked there could see me grabbing feminine products. But now, it has become my home, my safe place for the rest of my college experience. Of course there are other places I consider my home, sometimes it’s not even places. It’s people. My boyfriend is my home, my comfort. He makes me feel imperfectly perfect. But then I begin to wonder, What about men? Where are their safe places? Do they not have a safe space because it’s uncommon? I wonder these things when I walk into the center. Of course men are welcome inside the center, but maybe men are intimidated by the space. I feel like they are intimated by those bold lettered words above the entrance of the door. Maybe they feel like they would be judged for walking in and taking their own time to decompress. I started to think about the people I met in the center, the conversations I’ve had. There was one girl, I’ll call her M, she had Nigerian parents, we had a 20 minute conversation about the freedoms being a woman in college. We talked about relationships, how her parents wanted her to date her own ethnicity. She wished her parents allowed her to do anything. But just because she was a girl, she wasn’t able to go out, even past her driveway. I honestly am happy that I had parents who trusted me even though I was young developing woman in a very dangerous world. She too had came to the center to clear her head. That was the first time in a while that I had been confident enough to start a conversation with a stranger. But being in that environment helped me bring out my extroverted side. I also think it was just the fact that I am able to talk so comfortably to women. I would encourage any woman to go there for any needs they desire. Whether it be to get a tampon or pad, or a place to relax. I hope that anyone who reads this knows that there are places to go when you are feeling down to no energy. So don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to step into that center, you won’t regret it 🙂

When Accommodation is the Bare Minimum, What Next?

@acaffeinateddesi

why is November is making me so emotional #deaf #deaftiktok

♬ original sound – Sita

First, let me just say that TikTok is a great platform for people to speak out on what seems like small moments in their lives but are ultimately extremely impactful: few other platforms expect you to produce 60-second vignettes of information with little further context, but TikTok allows and almost requires the person behind the camera to get to the point very quickly.

To summarize the video that does not have captions (not all creators in all countries have access to that feature yet): This person is deaf and was raised in a hearing community. They started a new job, and were surprised and overwhelmed when they walked in on their first day and everyone in the office was wearing clear, see-through masks, meaning they would be able to lip read. Their first reaction was to feel gratitude for what felt like a gesture of kindness and welcome, and that they feel seen as a person.

I want to take what this person almost said and bring it a step further. This creator felt gratitude, felt welcomed, and felt seen, and they felt these things because their workplace had done what could be argued they are legally required to do in order for them to be functional in their job. While clear masks may not be spelled out as an accommodation in the ADA, it definitely became necessary during COVID-19 for the deaf community in order for them to be safe, but also to participate in society. Providing clear masks to what is presumably an office would not be considered undue hardship as it would be only slightly more expensive than providing ordinary masks to the workforce. An office with a mask mandate is most likely providing their employees with masks, so an office with a mask mandate and a deaf employee would then be legally required to provide clear masks to their workforce.

I will reiterate: This person felt gratitude because their employer did what they were legally required to do to accommodate their disability and did it promptly so the accommodation was in place when they started their first day of work.

As a member of the disabled community this tells me that the bar is on the ground. It may even be buried, and we are then overwhelmingly grateful when someone unburies the bar and hands it to us. It may still be covered in dirt and we may have a new worm friend but it’s been so long since some of us have seen the bar that we accept it as-is.

Can we even conceptualize what it would look like if every disabled person was given their accommodations on their first day of work? What would it look like if in an interview we could just hand a list to our potential employer and it wasn’t a factor in the hiring decision but simply part of their resume? What if everyone was required to submit a list of accommodations and workplace preferences as a part of their application, and it was simply accepted as standard and a best practice in hiring? What if these were accepted as necessary and automatic requirements as long as they fell under ADA guidelines and did not cause undue hardship to the employer, and thus every employer automatically provided them?

Let’s take this thought experiment one step further. What comes next? What does disability acceptance look like in a world where each individual’s needs were met to the furthest extent possible?

This may take some creative thinking on our part, but I think it’s possible to imagine. I personally can imagine an office where wheelchairs were equally as common as chairs. I can imagine that one person may be at a treadmill desk (there’s always at least one fitness enthusiast in an office) and another desk may be empty most of the time, as its owner largely worked from home. I can imagine that transcription of recorded virtual meetings would be as automatic as meeting notes, and that it would be an expectation that the office would rotate through who took on that job just like we do note-takers. I can imagine that this office would throw out traditional concepts of what a work day would look like, and what work production would look like, and that each individual would be allowed to work and produce work in a way that best suited their personality, lifestyle, neurodivergences and sleep schedules.

These ideas, though, still linger within the realm of accommodation. Is it possible to get even more outlandish in our conceptualization of disability in the workplace?

I can imagine a workplace where a disabled person has been promoted several times. I can imagine a workplace where when someone schedules a happy hour, they take into consideration locations that would be functional and welcoming for every member of the team, which may mean having drinks at a quiet restaurant instead of a loud, difficult-to-navigate bar. I can imagine that at the desk of the person who works from home, there is a prank hidden in the drawer for that person to find from a coworker who is thinking of them whether they’re physically there or not, and doesn’t care how long it takes them to find it. (Who doesn’t enjoy the long game?) I can imagine a scenario where every team member is appreciated for their social contributions to the team, and that for some people that may mean not eating lunch in the cafeteria, but may look like them tracking everyone’s birthdays and sending out celebratory emails to everyone. I can imagine that people with disabilities are treated like people and are accepted in all contexts of the word and are welcomed not only on the surface of being able to do their work adequately, but are welcomed as a human being joining a collective enterprise.

When the bar for disability accommodation is buried underground, acceptance and equity for disability is buried along with it.

When Failure is Radical.

Affirmations from an unreliable drop out –

I have failed to work with a system that prioritizes productivity over personhood.

I have chosen moving forward over suffering

I will accept myself to spite a value system that does not want acceptance – but always striving for “better”. If I internalize it, that I am always striving for “better”, then I build a comfortable place for the belief that I will never be enough, to rest upon. Instead, I will build space within myself to be less than ideal. 

I’m Really Not Gay Tho

The connections between race and sexuality that Patricia Collins mentions, for me, are really relatable. Even though she and many other feminist studies writers have focused on African American men and prison power dynamics, as an Asian man, I can see exactly what they might be talking about in my own history.

When I was growing up, I had a really high voice; it was really really high. Some people might have said things such as, “You sound like a girl”. It really was that high pitched. And ultimately, many people at my school assumed that “He must be gay”. It’s true. People even asked me about it.

When I told them “No”, many of my peers were confounded. “That can’t be!”, they said. They assumed I must be lying and this was big issue for them for a long while. But then, many people suddenly turned around and said that I wasn’t lying after all. And I was confused.

It turns out, according to some individuals, that my voice was so “feminine” because I was Asian. “Asian men are just much less masculine and we should just accept you because you can’t help but be that way”.

Now, I realize that this was an example of the connectedness between race and sexuality. Like African American women or the less masculine African American men that were called “bitch” or “dicksucker”, my say on who I was was ignored by my surroundings but instead got replaced by peoples assumptions. And conversely to African Americans who were threatened because of their race, I was “validated” as acceptable because of mine.

No one paused to think that my sexuality, a private issue, was being violated. And then no one stopped to think that “blaming” a whole race of people for my “situation” was sort of racist. Reading such passage has enlightened me that, in this scenario, there were interlocking systems of power at play. Race and gender, in my case and many others, were used as intersectional societal methods of control at the expense of those affected by such assumptions.

Queer Brokenness: Intersection with Mental Illness

Image Source: http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2015/12/south-asian-queer-community-lacks-visibility/  (Artist – Jinesh Patel)

(Content and Trigger Warning: Self Harm, Suicide, Substance Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, Bullying)

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I often find that mental illness and queerness aren’t addressed properly or constructively when talked about together. So often the public at large would have us believe that queerness is a result of mental illness or that mental illness is the result of queerness exclusively. With this in mind, the queer community will often push back on society’s behavior by talking about the two exclusively from each other, frequently ignoring all the ways mental illness intersect. That’s does not go to say that queerness is the result of mental illness or vice versa at all, but rather it shouldn’t be ignored that many people in the queer community go through both because of the way society has constructed and reacted towards queerness. For example, queerness has often been perceived as a deviant thing, it has historically been punished and worked against in a variety of ways.

This Sucks

I remember talking to my mom about the book I was reading, “Feminist Queer Crip” by Alison Kafer. When I talked to my mother about disability, she pointed to an experience in her past. She said, she remembered back in her country seeing a man without legs or arms in the streets with a sign that asked others for food. My mom made a point to tell me that the man wasn’t sad, but was singing about the glory of God.

A Reflection on the Past of a Gay Baptist

In 2011 I came out while simultaneously accepting Christ. Apparently, that is a very odd thing to do, especially on a Southern Baptist mission Trip in Lousiana. My camp counselor cried tears of joy for me, but looking back on it I think he thought I was rejecting my homosexuality, rather than affirming it. I thought I couldn’t be a good Christian if I wasn’t being honest with myself, my community, and God. So this decision made perfect sense to me at the time, and I stand by that, even though I don’t attend church much anymore (for many reasons that do not pertain to this discussion).

Queer Time in Donald Trump’s Amerikka

There have been interesting parallels between our class discussions around queer crip time and my current life. This has only become more obvious post election as I scramble to rework my five-year plan. I am not sure how much to share because while I am a very open person there are some aspects of my life that I prefer to keep private.

Creating Spaces

Being a part of a university really showed me the importance of having your own “space.” I mean I always knew that it was nice to feel like you were part of a group of friends or whatever but I didn’t realize the impact and the importance of this. By space I mean a place that you feel safe, valued, heard, welcomed, accepted and so on. Its only in college that I really understood the profound difference it makes in peoples lives to feel included in something or to feel a sense of belonging, even if its only in one small group of people who share your interests.