Much like the social construction of my own body, ravaged environments were “wounded space[s],” colonized and cast aside by ableist, capitalist culture.⁵ I found comfort in environments whose burdens were as heavy as my own and utilized these environments as partners for mourning as well as spaces of alternative strategy for practicing nonnormativity.⁶ Bringing disability into conversation with ravaged environments has been an essential part of how I’ve navigated and survived normative culture. These environments accepted me without complication: they taught me, before disability studies could, that physical disability is a condition of relational misfitting.⁷ Like me, these environments had been cast as misfits—unrestorable bodies—and under my gaze, they became a new baseline of correspondence, one that replaced ableist culture and its means of comparison.

Sara J. Grossman, writing in Living Lexicon

Thoughts: nonnormativity, ferality, disability, anti-psychiatry, neuro-divergence.