There is a correlation between having a mental disability and being queer, but a lot of homophobes use this narrative to push the idea that queer people are mentally ill. The truth is that people with disabilities are more often ostracized by society, leading them to more often go after alternative lifestyles. I am a great example of this. Because of my solitude, it made me realize that I like men a little bit. On late nights, alone I viewed web comics of guys in cute outfits. I tried to justify it by saying that “I’m not gay, this guy just looks like a girl” over time I had a hyper fixation over my sexuality, and enabled me to critically assess who I am. One day I said “forget it, I’m Bi now” and watched gay porn. My mental disability didn’t make me queer, but it led me to that discovery faster than a neurotypical person would. I would love some dialogue about this phenomenon, and I would like to be proven wrong.
Disability is not a monolith, nor is it within a void, absent of other influences like class and wealth. I am a great example of this. Like many people, my experience with disability is quite unique, but it was a journey paved with class struggle, and an unpredictable home life. These experiences paved the person you see in front of you today, and as much as I wish everything could’ve been different, but I don’t think I would have the grit I have today without my struggles.
Being born in a lower-middle class family is tough. Especially with ADHD and Autism. When you make a mistake you can clearly see how your actions which are out of your control affect your family financially. It feels me with guilt to see how difficult I made my parents lives with just me, being me. My home life wasn’t much better…. This was during a time when my father and mother were going further apart. My father brought prostitutes home, and my mother neglected us. As a result I started acting up in school, causing more hardship in my family. My childhood was an experience forever marred by guilt and self-doubt. I was also bullied in school and was constantly reminded that I will amount to nothing in this world.
While my father was becoming a better parent and my mother became more resentful, my teenage years were filled with me trying to find an identity. During high school, I decided to run track. My coach had become a second father figure to me, and together with my father, helped me cope when my mother abandoned us during my freshman year. Because of Covid, I had to revisit this all over again during my first years of adulthood. Not only did it ruin my dreams of running track in college, but it also caused my mother to pass away after years of not seeing her. I regressed back into my self-loathing self, and I felt that it was my fault that I never forgave her so that I could be at peace, and it made me ponder about my own mortality. In my subsequent semester, I was worried that I was going to amount to nothing in the world, like what those bullies told me. Throughout this episode of self-loathing, I forgot about the reality that I am failing my classes.
The summer of my freshman year, I set a goal in front of myself, and that goal was to never feel like this again. I am pleased to tell you that not only did I achieve that goal, I surpassed it! Over the past year, Ive gotten invaluable opportunities like heading to Portland Maine to northeastern university’s roux institute to learn how to be a successful entrepreneur, applied that knowledge gained in Johns Hopkins university’s Summer business academy, received a highly competitive spot in Chase bank’s advancing black pathways internship, and finally, being a part of an exclusive group of highly accomplished college students who happen to have a disability in the lime connect fellowship, and even got accepted into the university that denied me 2 years ago. This year is an allegory for my life. I started from the bottom, and now I’m here. I climbed mountains, and crossed canyons. I learned that everything isn’t my fault, and I conquered the purgatory of negative thoughts I had about myself. I finally got medicated for ADHD, found out that I’m not only bisexual, but Non-Binary and now I am more prepared for my next phase of my journey, which is being there for my community, and making sure that any black kid in the slump that I was in knows that they aren’t alone. That a life of tragedy, sacrifice, and self-loathing can be turned into something positive.
Not even a day before this unit, My father had very bad arthritis in his hands. It was very painful watching him in pain as his hands were spasming and in pain. It is a very direct reminder that my old man is actually getting older. He works at Food Depot in Baltimore, and he has worked there for 5 years. Over time, he has accumulated lesions on his skin (I think its called “psoriasis”) that were caused by him grinding his life away in a freezer. Also, one night he cut his finger very badly and went to the hospital, but still pulled through and bought me a game for Christmas. Despite his faults, he has always pulled through for my sister and I, and worked hard so that I wont have to work as hard. While he worked in a freezer all day, Ill be freezing in an office writing code on a computer. He always told me to be better than him, but I am deathly afraid that he wont be around to see that. Its very interesting to talk about what we do to have just a simple, dignified life. Parents have to destroy themselves just to provide the bare minimum for their kids.
His hands look like this so that my hands can look like this
When I spent my first two years at University of Maryland, eastern shore, that was the first time where I saw black people of a different socioeconomic status to myself. I was born poor, from a dysfunctional family and somehow I am surrounded by people who had it better than me. It is an interesting take because we often talk about black people as a monolith, but that is further than the case. Blacks can be as racist as non blacks, and whites can be as poor as non whites. The discussion that we had in class considering this interested me because I am still trying to find myself. I am doing great things, I am even the first in my family to have a job with a major corporation in my 20s, but I see these people who are the same color as me, achieving even more. Then I realize that they could be wealthier than my family and or their family is functional. I end this with saying that wealth has no race however there are strong correlations with being a certain race and your wealth.
Unruly Bodies 