Writer friends, I have a question for you. I often see or hear many people talk openly about their disabilities both online & in person, but many of these same people refrain from putting "disabled author" or "disabled writer" in their bios. Can we talk about why that is?

To be very clear: I am not judging, nor do I want to out people who aren't comfortable using the term. I'm just curious. I refrained from calling myself a disabled writer for a long time because I have a lot of abled privilege and it didn't seem fair. 2/

3/ I worried that I would be occupying space that wasn't meant for me, and didn't want to do that. But in my work as a festival organizer especially, I've noticed that I'll quite regularly encounter authors who speak of their disabilities but don't call themselves disabled.

4/ And what this means, from an organizational standpoint, is that I often plan or oversee events that actually have a fair amount of disability representation--but it isn't talked about or acknowledged as much as I wonder it should be.

5/ Consider eyeglasses, for example. Any visual impairment of any kind is a disability, but we are so used to the way that eyeglasses have been socialized as acceptable mobility devices that many people who wear glasses wouldn't consider themselves disabled.

6/ Again--not judging! Or pointing fingers! Honestly. I think it is helpful to have these kinds of conversations out in the open. Disability is a normal part of life, and covers an impossibly large range of ways of being. Just curious as to what people's thoughts are.

7/ One of the many other reasons I refrained from it was internalized ableism, which told me that identifying as disabled would mean that I was admitting I wasn't worth as much as a "regular" writer. What a terrible crock of horseshit--but I took as fact for so long.

8/ I am so deeply grateful for the ways that people have been engaging with this conversation today. Thank you! I want to stress, again, that I don't mean to say this as a way of pressuring people *TO* identify as disabled if they don't want to.

9/ Rather--I'm interested in the questions we carry, the thought processes behind what it means to navigate disability & the public perceptions of it. I also think it's important to note--when it comes to "taking up space"--that each disability necessarily has a different shape.

10/ As a physically disabled woman who also has non-disabled privilege and mobility, the space I occupy is different from that of a disabled person who might use a wheelchair, or have invisible disabilities, or be neurodivergent. Accordingly, the accommodations that I need will

11/ be different given different situations. It has helped me a lot to realize that occupying my own particular disabled body--and navigating my own challenges--does not in any way take away from or somehow overshadow the challenges of others.