Crip Time

Over the past months of shelter-in-place, I have felt the disconnect between crip time and linear time. Crip time refers to the difference in time for people with disabilities. We're late because our available transit options take longer. We can't work 9-5 because our bodies can't. We engage in countless hours of invisible labor to get the accommodations we need. I've been writing a piece on crip time, as well as a piece on my debilitating eye strain migraines with all I do now on screens, but because of those limitations I have not yet finished those pieces.  So, rather than offer my own thoughts, I want to encourage you to read this beautiful essay that describes the diverse implications of crip time: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684

"Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time."