- Rebekah Taussig - " Disability is at the very heart of what it means to be human " By Lisa Guthrie-Deabill
Tell us about yourself
I suppose I would begin with my curiosity . I am continually perplexed and fascinated by the world around / within me , and there is so much I long to understand . Finding words is the sturdiest way I ' ve found to make sense of what often feels like chaos . And because I ' m a disabled mother , daughter , partner and writer who grew up in the Midwest in the 90s , a lot of my writing looks out at the world through that lens . I first started sharing my writing publicly on my Instagram account @ sitting _ pretty in 2015 . And in 2020 , that writing evolved into a book by the same name . Before the book came out , I was also a teacher . But a few years ago , I pivoted away from the traditional classroom to writing , speaking , leading workshops and consulting full time .
You are an accomplished writer , having written dozens of articles , blogs and a book on living with a disability . Tell us what inspired your book , Sitting Pretty : The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body .
I ' ve been paralyzed since I was a pretty young kid . I got my first wheelchair when I was six . It was the 90 ' s , so of course it was hot pink . I ' ve used a wheelchair to get around everywhere since , but it wasn ' t until my late 20 ' s that I started to think with more curiosity about that experience . I ' d inherited a lot of stories of disability – from my family , church community and media – but I ' d never had the space or invitation to really think about what this embodiment meant to me . How would I tell this story ? What felt important to me ? What were the themes ? What was the tone ? It was actually in my PhD program , reading academic articles by disability scholars , that I first felt that prompt to consider for myself what my stories were . I found new language – like ableism and cripple punk – that felt uniquely true to my experience in my body , and it changed the way I saw myself and the world around me . Before that point , I knew next to nothing about disability history . I wasn ' t aware of disability community or culture . It was like I ' d put on 3D glasses , and suddenly , there was an entire dimension available to me that had been invisible before . And when I saw that , my world exploded . So I started writing about it .
Instagram became the container to hold all the words . At first I just wrote tiny snippets about things like the ongoing , exhausting fight to find affordable / accessible housing , my growing affection for the aesthetic of my scars , the feeling of showing up to teach
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