I did a double-take when I saw the 50th anniversary of 25 de abril, the day of Portugal's Carnation Revolution is coming up.
I was living in Lisbon during the 30th anniversary. And I'm sad to say that this blog post, that I wrote then as a Fulbright independent researcher, is still really valid. But the sense of societal amnesia is more acute, as a new centre-right government will enter Parliament along side a far-right party called Chega (Enough) that is very openly nostalgic for the values of Salazar.
So I last wrote about “crip futurism” but it struck me that so much about our future will be rediscovering our past. So often I hear white western futurists, or sometimes academics, theorising in very complex language about stuff that indigenous people have known for thousands of years.
One of the parts of The Dawn of Everything by the Davids (Graeber and Wengrow) that stuck with me personally was learning that in the first tens of thousands of years of human “civilisation”, disabled people were not invariably cast aside, treated as discards as our ableist society might lead us to imagine.
I'm newly and invisibly disabled. I'm still learning so much about my internalised ableism, and the ableist world I inhabit here and now. But what's been troubling me most recently is the overwhelmingly ableist visions of the future, especially among progressive communities.
I've had a couple of personal experiences which affected me deeply.
I went to continental Europe for the first time since February 2020 last week. With my illness and disability following the first wave of Covid, travel has become a lot harder for me, and I'd focused on visiting family in the US and seeing friends on trips much closer to home.
A work trip compelled me to go to the Netherlands, where I also got the chance to catch up with friends. From the moment I hit the Eurostar terminal, jam-packed full of loud, squirmy, able-bodied travellers at 7am, I started to get the feels about going “to Europe”.
Last summer, in my small back garden in Nottingham, a smallish city in the middle of England, I found myself simultaneously reading about two rebellions – the outbreak of luddism in this city in 1811, and the Uprising of the Malês, in Bahia about 25 years later.
I'd been made obsolete by Covid, after two years of struggling with pain and crushing fatigue, I stopped working. I am unsure why these two rebellions became the object of my slow, convalescent focus.
So I attended my first work(-adjacent) event of any description since getting sick with Covid in 2020 and not recovering. I felt a bit like an academia-crasher, as I'd spotted “Ecologies of Labour” at Nottingham Trent (around the corner) and I thought it sounded really engaging. As it's adjacent to my field of work, I felt justified in attending.
But when I arrived I realised it was more like a quite intimate workshop, not in a lecture hall. (I think I hadn't understood the academic codes correctly.) I was a little intimidated, as I already feel very conspicuous being the only one with a mask. But I stuck with it.
Well to be honest living is hard. My eight months dedicated to my recovery last year blew by. I read a lot. I took my time with everything. I took lots of baths. I sat in the back garden in the sunshine. I spent hours in an oxygen chamber at two atmospheres. But I didn't write like I'd hoped to.
At a certain point, I even felt myself lose interest in microposting. I was totally quiet until only a couple of months ago. I felt the need to be silent.
It's my “Covidversary” and I'm focusing on Fitz, the pugalier (pug x cavalier) we just rehomed, who in just 10 days has been such a boost. My body and my brain are basking in the new love we have for each other. It's been a tough couple of years, but I'm so lucky to have supportive family and a partner who have been so devoted to my wellbeing. They have never questioned the reality of my illness, and my new disability.
Three years ago today, it was a Friday afternoon and I was at the small wooden desk I bought after moving into my partner's place before lockdown. I had a strange headache I'd never had, one right behind my eyes. I tried to continue working, but after an hour or two, I was in bed.
We sat with one dimmed LED bulb and candle light for an hour in an effort to use less energy during a peak period, 5-6pm. (This is the period when typically, in winter, the government has to fire up dirty sources of energy, and pay horrible companies hundreds of millions of pounds to keep the lights on.)
We did so all the while believing that our government and our country has this all wrong.
When I was younger, I didn't understand my swings between a tail-wagging extrovert and a very solitary person who wanted to flee all social interaction.
I think I thought for a long time that the person fleeing was either depressed-me or rebellious-me. Me working through something.
Then I heard this term “ambivert” – filling in the space between Jung's extrovert-introvert binary.
