Breathless as if the smoke still lingered, on a recent morning she bundled her effervescent 3-year-old daughter, Luna, into her car seat for the two-hour trek from her aunt's house in Riverside, where they have lived for much of the past year, back to their family's 1909 Craftsman home. It stands steps from the Eaton fire burn scar - untouched, but uninhabitable.
After disasters - natural or otherwise - people with disabilities often find themselves in temporary lodging that offers a roof, but lacks the safe, customized environment they need. This can result in many dangers and difficulties, including leaving people in wheelchairs or who require walkers to spend weeks or months in unfamiliar rental housing with dangerous stairways, rather than accessibility-friendly ramps.
Patricia Willson, 93, stares intently at her leg as her nurse unwraps layers of bandages, revealing a scar that, to Willson's elation, is nowhere near as gruesome as it had been months ago. Hunched over from a fractured back, Willson scrolls through her phone to remind her nurse what the scar had looked like. Last December, she sliced her leg open on a box. A few months later, the three-inch gash got infected.
At 78 years old, Ranii was used to competing against younger opponents, but this one was especially boyish; no older than 12 by her estimation. If she leaned on him a little harder, she thought she could leave with a clean sweep. But after dropping the first two sets, the boy began to listen to advice from his parents, who had coached him throughout the match.
In the history of psychology, some of the deepest insights have come from asking a deceptively simple question: What if you could step into someone else's skin? For decades, psychologists have tried to make society more inclusive by asking people to imagine what life is like for someone different from them, but imagination only goes so far. You can picture what it might be like to roll into a job interview in a wheelchair, or to navigate a crowded hallway with limited mobility,
To my horror, I couldn't make out a single word on the display. The customer, a woman with her young daughter, stood impatiently as I froze. I didn't know what to say. After a few awkward minutes, the hiring manager dismissed me and I received a rejection email the next morning. My dreams of attending Wireless and Reading festivals with my friends disintegrated and I had another, more important, revelation: for the first time in my life, I realised that I was disabled.
Disabled residents living in temporary accommodation have said broken lifts forced them to sleep in the lobby. The Waterloo Hub Hotel (WHH) on Kennington Road, near Lambeth North station, houses dozens of people, some with limited mobility, under the care of Camden and Westminster councils. Wheelchair-user Michael said he was told by the council "to walk up the stairs", but "I am disabled".
What is the relationship between disability and well-being? (In this post, I'll call this the Relationship Question.) The Relationship Question is both enormously complex and highly fraught -philosophically, socially, and politically. Philosophers have starkly different views. One prominent view, held by Elizabeth Barnes, is that disability is a Mere Difference: having a disability does not, on its own, make one's life go worse, although in our ableist society, disabled people are more likely to live worse lives because of barriers and stigmas.
Fashion is a vocabulary. Clothing communicates parts of who we are, what we are interested in and how we want to be seen. It reveals choices that we make but it also exposes lack of choice. I am a disabled woman; I have dwarfism. My disability and stature is obvious and often shapes a first interaction. I've learned to love scouring through rails of clothes in high street stores and charity shops,
To 2049 by American poet Jorie Graham is one of my favourite collections of recent times and rereading it recently was incredibly rewarding. Filled with slippery and existentially evocative lines such as Years pulled their / lengths through us like long wet strings, it had me pointing at some of the pages gasping: I wish I wrote this! (a condition I frequently suffer from, known as poem-envy).
"Analysis of the proposals shows that the impact will be substantial, destroying the financial safety net for too many disabled Londoners," he wrote on social media.
Rosie Jones' new series "Pushers" aims to depict the struggles of being a disabled, working-class person in today's society, emphasizing the reality behind humor.
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