Disability Visibility: First-person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

One of the many hard lessons people learned during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is how much we could be doing for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent individuals, but we just don’t. Companies that claimed for decades that workarounds and working-from-home were simply not viable options suddenly figured them out pretty damn quick when lockdowns demanded that people isolate.

And it’s frustrating. It shouldn’t take knowing someone with a disability to make you care about the health, wellbeing, and day-to-day struggles of the disabled. But if you don’t know someone (or even if you know many), you should still read Disability Visibility. This collection of blog posts, personal essays, and other writings brings people’s experiences home in truly stark fashion. “Lost Cause” by Reyma McCoy McDeid, in particular, was brilliant and heartbreaking in equal measures.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t just a book of misery porn, or complaints, or testimonials collected to shame people into action. It is a book rich in determination, in triumph, in hope. These essays show the community being built by disability activists, and they make you want to do more to help. It makes these authors part of your family, your circle of friends. It’s a hard read at points, but an incredibly worthwhile one.