Disability doesn’t just affect our physical bodies. It affects the entirety of how we move through—and are allowed to move through—our world. Whether our disabilities are visible or invisible, whether they affect our physical movement or mental processing, whether they are a result of accident, genetics, disease, or aging: the truth is that at some point in our lives, we all fall below our social baseline of “able-bodied.” When we live in a society and culture that is oriented around individual independence instead of communal well-being, we can face layers of limitations that impact our mental, physical, emotional, and relational health. While disability does limit us, it can be helpful to recognize which limitations are in our bodies and which ones are assumptions we are making about ourselves—and each other.
