I’m a Planned Parenthood Health Education Intern stationed in a high school in Baltimore, where I teach classes and do “lunchtime tabling” where the other interns and I have a table in their lunchroom where students come to talk to us. A girl came up to me at lunch and told me she had the implant and was worried it wasn’t working–I asked her why she felt it wasn’t working, thinking she had a pregnancy scare and preparing to talk her through other birth control options, and her response was “I don’t feel any different.” I explained that after insertion, your arm might feel sore, but it will wear off and after then you likely won’t really feel the implant and, while some people experience mood swings, everyone is different and there’s no way the implant could have been expelled or somehow left your body–once it’s in, it’s working. I said if she was apprehensive she should talk to her doctor, but most likely nothing was wrong. Another girl asked me if she was taking her pills right; I asked if she took them every day at or around the same time and she said yes. I told her that’s the right way to take them. Girls, specifically ones already on birth control, often come to me with the assumption they’re doing something wrong with their bodies, worried they’ve somehow messed something up and don’t know exactly how their birth control works. The onus of blame for things like unplanned pregnancy is often placed on women because of gendered assumptions about female sexuality and promiscuity when in reality unplanned pregnancy is something that can be anyone’s “fault,” which is a word I don’t like to use. This blame makes it so much harder to ask questions when you know the response you’ll get might be one that vilifies you, and for teenagers, this is a formidable ground to navigate.

The reading about disability and sexuality made me think about how we decide who gets to experience sexual pleasure without critique; for a subject so personal and intimate, the mainstream dialogue of pleasure is often conditional and unforgiving. The most common thing I hear from the kids is, unprompted, “Oh, I don’t do that,” with a frowning face when they see us handing out condoms or talking about sexual health. Over and over, they tell me they’re not like those people, the ones who have sex, and over and over I tell them that A. I don’t have a single personal feeling or judgment about if they do or don’t have sex and B. if they did “do that,” there’s nothing remotely wrong with it and the only reason I’m involved in the conversation is to help them make safe and healthy choices. It always surprises me how often this response makes them soften. I can tell from the (frankly juvenile) things some of their teachers and administrators say, to each other, the kids, or us, that many of the adults in their lives have made sex a moral stain. It’s hard not to feel defeated a little when I see how deep some of these things run within them, but I feel much better after I teach a class (which I do Dr. Kate, style, structured largely like a discussion because I always want to know what they have to say) knowing that at least one person has talked to them about sex in a way that doesn’t make them feel bad about it.

”The Normalisation Agenda and the Psycho-Emotional Disablement of Autistic People” explains that the dynamic qualities of autistic people are understood from the outside–particularly with regards to parents and those facilitating behavioral treatment for autistic people–as a pathological deficit. The assumption of deficit here forges a negative association between the diagnosis of autism and the ability to function; the diagnosis in these spaces represents a problem to be solved or otherwise treated and responded to. While diagnoses can indeed help tremendously with necessary treatment and can aid an individual who finds themselves having difficulty completing necessary tasks, it seems remiss to think of a diagnosis in such a light that it is solely the predecessor to an attempt at changing the self/the self’s habits. Diagnosis can function as a powerful tool for crafting and strengthening one’s sense of self and consequently membership in a community. There’s a great deal of validation, too, that comes with having an explanation in some capacity for traits and habits that larger society (and potentially the individual themselves) might fail to understand.

I remember when my cousin told me and my mother she thought she had autism. I’ve thought for a long time that she’s autistic. My (and my mother’s) suspicion of this wasn’t a negative assumption meant to emphasize deficit, but a simple descriptor of someone we knew very well. When she told us this, both my mother and I told her we think she was probably right and that we see that in her too. She was so excited that we thought the same thing, visibly happy that we saw her. My mother talked to my aunt (her mother) about it and explained that she should look into getting her diagnosed because it can help her find the resources she might need to help her function the best she possibly can and she will be able to understand herself and be understood by her family and others better; my aunt was hesitant about this until my mom explained to her what a diagnosis could do. My cousin got diagnosed and it’s proven to be incredibly helpful. Previous misunderstandings between my cousin and her parents and frustration with her on their part were partially ironed out with this diagnosis, and she has a lot of joy participating in communities of other autistic people, especially online. I remember being overjoyed along with her when we agreed with her about her self-diagnosis, and in no capacity was I thinking of it as a problem. I’ve been very close with her our whole lives, and to me, the only real “problem” to be solved was other people failing to understand and accommodate her; she is an exceptionally intelligent, lively, and compassionate person and a diagnosis aided her in these areas. Joy, here, and in many spaces, is paramount. To remember that neurodivergent people can be and are joyful is to respect their complexity and humanity, and not fall victim to doom-centric narratives about diagnosis and the resulting action.

I’m doing an application for an internship. It asks me–strictly for diversity data collection, it clarifies (I am suspicious)–if I have a disability. It then lists disabilities, most of them things I understand to be disabilities in the conventional sense, things I would list when asked for some examples of disability. I’m skimming the list for no real reason because I know I don’t have a disability. I get to the bottom: Anxiety, Depression. I pause. I have those things–in a clinical, diagnostic capacity, I have those things. I’ve never been confronted with the direct possibility that on me they are disabilities.

I remember in high school having a 504 plan recommended by my therapist that I would have to review with each teacher I had providing me with academic accommodations because my anxiety heavily impacted my performance in school. I google “504 plan” and The DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) Center at the University of Washington, Seattle tells me that a 504 plan “is a plan developed to ensure that a child who has a disability identified under the law […] that will ensure their academic success and access to the learning environment.” Oh. I guess I never considered it a plan for disability when I had it. It seemed more like a plan to make up for the fact that I couldn’t function like my peers, which I guess could define a disability. I never thought to legitimize that by naming it as one–others in my 504 testing groups had real disabilities, it seemed to me, and I could recognize that but didn’t find it appropriate to use a word so weighty for my experiences when I didn’t think mine were that bad.

The social model decides that “disability is something imposed on top of our impairments,” and it’s this that gives me pause filling out the form–is there another thing on top of my impairments? I think about what the thing would look like; the model tells me it’s a disadvantage brought on by social and cultural expectations of a body, of functionality. I have an impairment, and there are impeding expectations of productivity I am sometimes unable to meet because of these impairments, and it seems I can syllogistically conclude that this is a disability. But it feels like I’m missing some step in the middle. Drawing this conclusion beckons me to be aware of its gaps, and the ways my particular experience mitigates the effects of impairment; my socioeconomic standing provides me with health insurance that covers the cost of therapy and medication, and the support from my family allows me to find ways to cope with my impairment and be successful in spite of it. It still feels weird for me to claim a label so historically contingent and significant for those whose goals in their everyday lives are significantly impeded by a world that won’t accommodate them. Then again, my qualification for a 504 plan classified me as an individual with a disability. I have a tendency to distrust bureaucratic categorizations of identity, though, and recognize they’re more so for convenience and classification than anything. Plus I don’t have a 504 plan anymore in college, largely because I was too lazy to set one up, and I’m excelling in school regardless. I don’t know. I pause and click “No, I do not have a disability.”

I grew up here and have never lived anywhere else. The house I was born and raised in is about ten minutes from UMBC. Catonsville’s reputation precedes it–telling others from the county where I’m from, Catonsville conjures the immediate image of overwhelming whiteness. I remember as a kid spending the longest time being unaware of whiteness, of my own existence and participation in it, because it was almost all I saw. To me, at an age where my brain had not developed enough to conceptualize a world beyond the five-mile radius within which my home, school, and all of my friends lived, this was the world.

Baltimore itself is incredibly segregated. This is no secret. The county, too, is sprawling and deeply varied in its socioeconomic contents to an extent I did not realize was exceptional until I understood that most counties elsewhere differ from it in this respect. Telling someone you’re from Catonsville means something significantly different than, say, Dundalk, Pikesville, Owings Mills, and on and on. My elementary school–reported to be 68% white–is only about 5 miles from my best friend’s elementary school in Windsor Mill, an area with a high Desi (members of the South Asian diaspora) population and he tells me he went to school where almost all the kids were Desi like him. He and I didn’t know each other as children, and despite living so close to one another, there was almost no way we could have met.

With regards to racial phenomenology and race as a result of perception and a visible phenomenon, Linda Alcoff says that “A reduction of racism will affect perception itself, as well as comportment, body-image, and so on. Toward this, our first task, it seems to me, is to make visible the practices of visibility itself, to outline the background from which our knowledge of others and of ourselves appears. in relief.” I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the plan to better integrate schools in the Catonsville area, an effort that was dually also meant to solve overcrowding, had been actually put into effect; would the realm of the visible impact the children from the school I grew up in (and the ones around it) in such a way where they would not grow up to become their parents, vehemently protesting the proposal to try and fix our problem with modern-day segregation? To be a child is to only know what you can see. The phenomenology of children is predicated on what is visually and socially available to them in the most basic sense, and they are still in many ways attached to their mothers; their first-person experience of the world is a world that has been carefully (or carelessly) curated by their parents. Making the practices of visibility appear visible means lifting whiteness out of its “default” positionality; for kids, everything they see appears intentional and salient, representative of the world at large. Failing to account for this and making invisible the experience of racial embodiment, my town is overrun with ghosts, with specters of possibility. Something could have been done. Something has not been done.