A Glossary of Illness
Access: Attachment. Maybe a ramp, maybe a wound that mends outward, with overgrowth of tissue that dangles like a tether. Always, the path back to where humans began.
Accommodation: Innovation, to make new. 1. Fighting abled norms to a draw. For now. 2. Living inside the glass house of your body, no curtains, notes to remember your birthday, your phone number, which you list underneath your full name before important phone calls.
Diagnoses: Stored in the playroom’s old cedar chest of dress-up clothes, some of them from the closets of ancestors. A black-beaded veil I knew, without asking, belonged to my grandmother, worn to her husband’s funeral, hard glass beads that clack and rustle as I try it on for size.
Disability: A noun that, in the hands of the right us, troubles its way toward power.
Eligibility: A popularity contest which may increase the odds of survival.
[em]Bodied[ment]: The protagonist for healing.
Healing: The ugly pain of loving one’s relationship to embodiment while wishing, idly, for divorce.
Injury: The socially sanctioned sibling to illness. Sometimes, its mother.
Pain: The bottom rung of the ladder leading to the cellar no one else has been to, where everyone lives.
Health Care Provider: A human who may not learn your name (see Diagnoses, above), or who might stand, for years, behind the curtain of your stage, suggesting lines as you speak your way through this play you did not audition for, which is now your life. Or who might, as you’re lying on the exam table, pause before taping the bandage to ask if it might cause a rash.
Health Insurance: See Access, Eligibility, above.
Medical Records: The autograph of my person as written by the other. Necessary data.
Trauma: The consequence of injury[ies], mis-taken for its cause. Trauma’s natural form, like all living beings [1], is spiral.
[1] See Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year
Ann Daniel Long lives in Warren County, Virginia. They live with chronic illness due to TILT: Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance. They worked as a labor/community organizer and grant writer prior to their disability.
