Elsa Sjunneson Quotes

Being a burden is the thing that I struggle with the most.

Would you want to be compared to somebody whose entire monolithic mythology is about how she had to be taught how to conform?

I was enough before ableism came for me. My dearest wish is that society will learn to accept disabled bodies as whole, instead of viewing disabled bodies as lesser than, instead of creating value judgements based on how a disabled person accesses their world.
Wholeness is not determined by how many eyes you have or how many working ears you have. It doesn't depend on which limbs work or how many of them you have, either. Wholeness is about personhood, and honoring the bodies of your fellow humans.

Most Deaf kids have home signs; they develop their own ways to get what they need. I have my own, too. My colleagues in the science fiction world who sign can get my attention, can communicate with me if they really need to. A lot of the signs we use aren't "real," but they're the ones I use, and that's why we use them together.

You must ask who’s telling the story and what their angle is.

How do we come to you now in the body that you're already in?

Ableism is how non-disabled people make the world unsafe for disabled people.

So diagnosis capitalism is the idea, but fundamentally capitalism benefits from giving people diagnoses. Because you make money on people having labels.

When people thrust their perception of how you should be onto you, that is horror.

With each closed door, with each insult, I fold. I crease. I twist. I bend. I make something out of the rage that wells up inside of my chest. It sits somewhere beneath my collarbone; I can feel it sometimes. I live in a world that doesn't want me.

To move past being surprised or awed that I can live my life, and to undo the ableism that led them to believe I couldn't do things in the first place.

Nondisabled people are the ones defining disability as a whole. They decide what is possible to live with, and what gets discarded as useless.

Because the reality is being disabled is hard. It's not easy. And so, I don't want you to find that inspiring because it's just how my life is, but I want people to get it so that the world can change.

I do think that hearing from her is important. By letting the mythology of William Gibson be the only record that we teach kids, we’re letting a man tell us what a woman’s life was like, and not just any man, we’re talking about a non disabled man.

That's the trap with memoirs, you have to be honest no matter how uncomfortable it makes you!