Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

There's a special poignancy to a poet relating personal experiences of chronic pain and disability. By turns eloquent and raw, the author touches on issues of accessibiity and ableism (internalized and perpetrated by others) fostering rage, and grief and self-hatred, battling against acknowledgement of privilege and personal awareness of being loved and desired. Also vividly recounted are the trauma of an extensive medical history, multiple surgeries to manage her disability contrasted with the darker past of America's eugenics-forced-sterilization period in response to similar disabilities; the modern anxieties of health insurance and considering motherhood when her cerebral palsy is likely to giver her a shorter time frame than others who aspire to bear children; the lack of representation that made growing up with a disability that much harder to envision a future; how exhausting it is to constantly be advocating/explaining because her particular mobility restrictions are never automatically accepted/accomodated. 

I can vouch as an athiest that I did not find the thread of religion running through to be ‘preachy'. Just a way an individual found solace, and an improved outlook. 

And then there's the twin sister who died shortly after birth to add to the mental load...‘Fragments, Never Sent' WILL make you cry. 

Taken as essays rather than a cohesive narrative, I don't find the subject matter overwhelming, but I wouldn't say it's a light read, and I'd argue for all the moving/travelling that is mentioned it's really NOT a travelogue. 

It provided what I hoped for, which is an honest perspective from a person living with chronic pain, with a disability. I think all those existing  with able-bodied privilege would benefit from reading it, always with the understanding that this is one person's perspective living in one situation, with a specific condition - disabled people are not a monolith; one story does not define all experiences and individual barriers.