my first class of the year when I knew my students weren ' t expecting their teacher to use a wheelchair . I called these bits of writing mini-memoirs , and I didn ' t imagine they would be relevant to very many people . I was amazed to discover the opposite was true . I found so many beautiful humans in that space – like the ones sharing their own stories with disability , or the ones who weren ' t disabled , but genuinely wanted to understand the experience , or the people who showed up simply because they recognized something human in my writing . I ' m still amazed by the connection , solidarity , friendship and community I found here .
The more I wrote , the more the writing itself evolved . The stories I wanted to write were becoming more complex and vulnerable , and I was struggling to fit everything into the tiny squares . At the same time I started longing for more space for these words to unfurl , I connected with my literary agent , Laura Lee Mattingly . She had the skills and experience to guide me through the process of imagining how to leap from mini-memoirs to a memoir in essays .
Rebekah , 1994
Why is it important for you to put your thoughts into words to share with others ?
Rebekah , Summer 2016
The first part of this question – the drive to put my thoughts into words – might be something as simple as how my brain works . Writing is my mind and my heart . I don ' t know who I am , where I am , or what I think without the language to describe it . But I wonder if part of this drive to gather the words into stories that feel true started with growing up in a world that did not have the words or stories to fully represent my experience here . For the majority of human history , the stories of disability have been told by ( written , directed , performed by ) people who did not share that experience . And so , inevitably , those stories were flat and distorted approximations of something very real . It ' s important to me to put my thoughts into words , because I haven ' t seen them anywhere else .
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