“This visa is expired. Please step to the side.”

This could have been the opening to a spy thriller or a rollicking cyberpunk novel, full of chase scenes and neon lights. It certainly felt cyberpunk, being hustled back through the airport to a waiting taxi, surrounded by over-enthusiastic grifters and uncaring security guards. I cried in the cab on the way back to the apartment that was not in our name.

The year was 2016. My name was Jacqueline Bryk, and my boyfriend and I were being held under house arrest in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, for visa fraud.

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the whole ordeal was that it wasn’t our fault. Our visas had been procured through a third party, who promised to handle everything. We were in China at the behest of my boyfriend’s employer, who wanted us to help set up an ESL tutoring business. The third party was supposed to be our local liaison. He abandoned us and went back to Guangzhou three weeks into the three months.

If I was a heroine in a fantasy novel, those threes would have meant something to me. We were on the 27^th floor of our building. Three cubed. Three months in China. Three flights to catch there. Three hundred and twelve ESL instructional videos made. Three, three, three.

Phedre no Delaunay of Kushiel’s Dart might have found a universal cypher in those threes and made a key out of a hairpin to get herself out.

Tenar from The Earthsea Cycle would have seen it as an echo of her service to the nine Nameless Ones, and left that area as quickly as possible, resolving to never let them get a hold on her.

Hypatia Cade of The Ship Who Searched would have collected her things and flown herself and her partner out of imprisonment, without so much as a by-your-leave. Who would stop her?

I did none of these things. Instead, I floated along in my glass tower, and wept oceans while being shuttled in and out of holding cells, police stations, and government agencies for four days. It was 90 degrees the whole time, and the air smelled like vomit. My lungs were full of dust and tears. I am not a priestess or a changeling or an anguisette. I still have nightmares about that time, a year later. My therapist gave me a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, on top of my cyclic depression and overwhelming anxiety.

They were always there for me, though, these ladies and others of paper and ink. Even before China, I knew I could trust them. Tenar knew what I was going through, as a homeschooled Catholic child, constantly being pressured to represent an unstable family life with courtesy, dignity, and silence. She would not have told me what I was going through wasn’t “real abuse” just because her jailers were dark gods and not sneering parents. Phedre was there for me after both of my sexual assaults, reminding me that I was allowed to be terrified and hurt, but also have a healthy romantic life while in recovery. I was never kidnapped by a Viking overlord or the megalomaniacal god-king of darkness, but being violated by people I trusted was scarring just the same.

Hypatia lost her body to a debilitating illness, but became a cutting-edge interstellar spacecraft instead. She could have chosen to merely survive, but she thrived. Her disability changed her, but did not define her entire being. She was a brainship, but a brainship who liked to play chess and study artifacts and crush on her human partner, Alex. In the same way, I have a mental illness that knocks me out of “normal” human life in some ways—but that doesn’t mean I am no longer human.

I was scared once, but I am not dead.

Now I survive, but not alone.

These worlds are always there for me. These characters are always there for me.

“You’re safe,” they say. “We understand. We went through the same things and we survived. Now it’s your turn.”

Now it’s my turn.

Now I survive.

Last year, my queer platonic partner gifted me the graphic novel version of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. For us, this gift served as the meeting place of our passions—a book that bridges her love of comics and graphic novels with my love of gut-wrenching, meaty speculative fiction. Upon receipt, I made an effort to read the novel before reading the graphic novel to see the translation of prose to imagery. PhD life took over though, and instead of finishing the novel first, I found myself curled up one evening carefully making my way through Damian Duffy and John Jennings’s graphic novel adaptation.

Reading the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred was nothing short of difficult for me. Watching Dana’s evolution from subject to circumstance to active abolitionist reminded me of watching Cicely Tyson’s tour de force performance in “A Woman Called Moses” as a child. “A Woman Called Moses” is a biographical TV movie chronicling Harriet Tubman’s journey to founding the Underground Railroad. In both Kindred and “A Woman Called Moses,” the disablement of black women’s bodies is central to the plotline as Dana and Harriet endure acts of physical violence at the hands of their slave masters. Experiencing the disabling effects of bondage are the catalysts that propel both Harriet and Dana to seek liberation—for themselves and others. Through Dana and Harriet’s perspectives, both narratives reimagine life during antebellum slavery, particularly the possibilities and difficulties associated with liberation from bondage. Reimagining presents a language of fugitivity—freedom from antiblack violence and the spectre of white supremacy that looms over both plantations Dana and Moses are entrenched in.

Yet for all the speculative possibilities these stories present, I realized a language about disability is largely absent from what it means to seek liberation from bondage, despite its centrality to both stories. By and large, Kindred and “A Woman Called Moses” are not discussed as slave narratives whose protagonists are explicitly named as disabled black women. Subsequently, the disablement Dana and Harriet endure is often belted under the frame of antiblack violence as an explanation as to why they sought freedom from bondage, but not what it means for disabled black women to be architects of fugitivity. When disability is named, it is usually done by black disabled folks who are trying to assert disability as integral to the terrain of black struggle. Such a reluctance to explicitly name Dana, Harriet, and other figures of slave narratives as disabled not only highlights the absence of a language around disability and afrofuturism, but the implications of such silences in terms of how the future is envisioned as a space of black liberation.

So much of afroturism’s liberatory potency and radical imagination comes from the ability of black people to be the architects of their own futurity. Florence Oyeke says as much when she suggests that, “afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it, too.” One way black futures are crafted is through declaration: the act of naming the existence of black people in the future, the roadmap to which is charted in afrofuturist works. An example of this is Alisha B. Wormsley’s billboard declaration, “there are black people in the future.” This declaration was born out of frustration not only from noticing the absence of nonwhite faces in science fiction films and television shows, but also the rapid demise of the black American neighborhood. Both Oyeke and Wormsley demonstrate the power of naming within the afrofuturist imagination, its significance in shaping the terrain of possibility. Naming a future that’s free from different manifestations of antiblack violence means determining a different relationship with time.

Temporal difference not only shapes the creation of narratives, but also the body-minds at the center of those narratives—what body-minds exist in the future and the stories told about their becoming. Representations of afrofuturist body-minds are very much a function of what people desire to make visible, absent, or marginal within the schema of narrative construction. It’s often when I encounter body-minds in afrofuturist works that I’m left wondering about the shaky existence of black disabled body-minds in afrofuturism and the general absence of language around disability. Too often I look at what constitutes a body-mind in the afrofuturist imaginary and am left wondering, “which black people are in the future?”

Take, for example, the prevalence of the posthuman in afrofuturism. On the one hand, there is the posthuman cyborg, most famously Janelle Monae’s alter ego Cindi Mayweather. Monae’s android persona is an example of how cyborgs in afrofuturism aren’t automatically understood as disabled subjects the way they might be for crip futurists, crip cyborgs, or Donna Harroway’s cyborg manifesto. Monae doesn’t use any language around disability to describe her conception of androids in relation to Cindi Mayweather. Instead, Monae understands Cindi as the mediator between flesh and hand, “the oppressed and the oppressor.”¹ Similarly, Kristen Lillvis notes the dual symbolism of Cindi’s “Digital Auction Code” (DAC) featured on the Electric Lady album cover artwork. The DAC represents the branding of enslaved Africans at the same time it marks her liberation from bondage—Cindi is not for sale.² The lack of language naming Cindi as a disabled cyborg suggests that while it’s possible to interpret her as such, cyborg and disability are not inherently synonymous in afrofuturism. Similarly, there’s the afrofuturist posthuman with supernatural abilities. In Parable of the Sower, Laura Olemina’s hyperempathy distinguishes her from other characters. As Sami Schalk notes, hyperempathy is understood as a condition as a result of a birth defect.³ In an interview with Juan Williams on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Butler explains that Laura’s mother was addicted to the small pills. As a result, Laura is born with hyperempathy.⁴ The question in interpretation becomes whether hyperempathy is understood as a disability and based off what criteria. Schaulk uses the example of Williams assertion that Laura isn’t disabled. In response to an ableist remark William’s makes, Butler asserts that she never said Laura wasn’t smart, to which Williams concludes that intelligence cancels out hyperempathy as a form of disability.⁵ 

When considering existing conceptions of afrofuturist body-minds, I wonder about the seduction of the posthuman. The trend of afrofuturist posthumanism points to a particular consciousness around the possibilities of black bodies in the future. Lillvis understands afrofuturist posthumanism as a form of consciousness that responds to the conceptual construction of blackness that occurs because of the Middle Passage.⁶ Thus, afrofuturist posthumanism provides a space to think about black identity independent of white supremacy.⁷ Building on this, I understand the prevalence of the non-disabled afrofuturist posthuman as a way of envisioning black bodies outside the spectacle of antiblack violence as opposed to “facilitating its objectifying qualities.”⁸

Afrofuturist posthumanism is a way black people have explored the effects of the Middle Passage on flesh, consciousness, and time.⁹ It names how the enduring legacy of antiblack violence is enshrine through the marking of black body-minds through enslavement. It names the process of how violence marks the black body-mind as non-human, and how non-human status justifies the continued subjugation. As Zoe Samudzi and William Anderson note, the marking of the flesh is about personhood as much as it is about the social status of the enslaved African.¹⁰ At the same time, afrofuturist posthumanism names how the afterlife of slavery perpetuates black suffering, it also provides a view of black futures free from white supremacy. As Ytasha Womack notes, afrofuturism flips conventional thinking about blackness on its head by rejecting stereotypes, dystopian fatalism, and hopelessness often associated with black characters. Instead, afrofuturism demonstrates that within the terrain of the speculative, fatalism is not synonymous with blackness.¹¹ Black suffering is visible, but it is not an entranchant condition.

If afrofuturism is about envisioning black futures free from violence and suffering, then to paraphrase Lillvis, new types of consciousness around the black body-mind must emerge.¹² The black body-mind undergoes a conceptual shift—from enslaved to liberated subject. It is no longer a site of fatalism, but a site of possibility for the future. In this way, if blackness is ascribed the status of non-human under white supremacy, then the afrofuturist posthuman is an attempt to envision the black body-mind as one that is “fully human.” Afrofuturist posthumans are creative visions of the body-minds to come, the body-mind that is free from violence that is no longer the spectacle of suffering on the world’s stage. The body-mind to come is the afrofuturist posthuman that enjoys the humanity of the black human that doesn’t currently exist.

But like any attempt at worldbuilding or futurism, omitting disability from schemas of afrofuturist posthumans has consequences. If alternative worldbuilding means imagining better futures, then the afrofuturist posthuman as predominately non-disabled demonstrates the complexity of mapping an emerging conception of humanity onto the black body. In linking disablement primarily with enslavement or past history, disability is symbolized as a vestige from an oppressive past to be done away with. Disability gets understood as part of what makes black people non-human under white supremacy. In making these links, it fails to interrogate why an emerging consciousness around afrofuturist posthumanism assumes that excluding disability inherently facilitates the transition from non-human to post-human in black futures. It fails to interrogate how a future without black disabled body-minds is symbolic of black liberation from white supremacy.

Subsequently, it fails to ask why the black disabled body-mind isn’t already considered post-human. What are the underlying assumptions about the relationship between black liberation and posthumanism that would justify the exclusion of black disabled body-minds? What about black disabled body-minds provokes anxieties about the overarching status of “non-human” assigned to black people under white supremacy? In many respects, linking disability to past oppression is ironic given that afrofuturism attempts to move away from conceiving of black body-minds as sites of fatalism. For all its liberatory aspirations, afrofuturist posthumanism has yet to envision disability as part of an emergent consciousness of black body-minds conceptualized independent of white supremacy. It has yet to engage a vision of the future where the presence of black disabled folk signals to a vision of liberation from violence exists in multiple manifestations.

The presence of black disability in afrofuturist posthumanism doesn’t have to connote to the sort of fatalism afrofuturism seeks to avoid. It can represent the liberation of the black body-mind, a radical shift in existence where one doesn’t have to be able-bodied to have a chance at surviving into the future. The black disabled body-mind can explore the abundant possibilities for the world to come, in our body-minds to come.

The black cyborg, as an explicitly disabled cyborg, can signal the onset of a new world where advanced adaptive technology isn’t cost prohibitive and thus financially inaccessible. The black disabled cyborg can also signal to a world where adaptive technology is given to black disabled people as part of reparations for histories of violent, non-consensual medical experimentation. The presence of the black disabled cyborg can usher in a world where black disabled folks finally reap what white supremacy in medicine has sown at the expense of our ancestors’ pain and exploitation.

Similarly, the inclusion of black disabled body-minds in the future can be represented in the physical restructuring of society. The predominantly black neighborhood Wormsley’s billboard highlights the disappearance of can be redesigned to fuse accessibility with the tenants of self-sufficiency, environmental, and economic sustainability that have become cornerstones of black liberation movements. Black neighborhoods can re-emerge, victorious in the fight against gentrification; replete with accessible and sustainably designed infrastructures and community resources.

In essence, the presence of black disabled body-minds in afrofuturism can tell the story of how our people overcame antiblack violence, accounting for our multifaceted presence in the future, our thriving, as opposed to our extinction. “A Woman Called Moses” and Kindred are examples of this, the power of the black disabled imagination in carving out pathways to liberation. The disablement both Dana and Moses experience plays a role in their choice to seek freedom from antiblack violence. It not only gave them an idea of the world they didn’t want to live in, but the world they did want to live in. It plays a role in how they seek to change the present to affect the future, and how they sought to accomplish liberation. The existence of their narratives show how black disabled body-minds are powerful architects of black futures, one that can truly be understood through an evolving language of afrofuturism that accounts for disability it all its complexity.

Post-script:

In the process of finishing this piece, another black man became a hashtag, marking yet again the omnipresence of police brutality and the spectacle of antiblack violence. On July 15, 2018 Harith Augustus was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. In the aftermath of his death, residents of South Shore gathered at the site of his murder to to protest not only the death of a beloved community member but the continued presence of policing within their lives. As a resident of South Shore, I have witnessed my community’s anger, heartache, and grief in many manifestations. In the process, I witnessed Chicago Police Officers violently attack residents of South Shore and others who had gathered in solidarity.

During the South Shore Uprising, I quickly scanned the crowd. Among us were black people in wheelchairs (both manual and electric), using adaptive devices not unlike my cane, and elders being accompanied by their familial caretakers to safety. In the events that have followed thus far, I’ve noticed an array of black disabled folks from the community in attendance. Black disabled people have made themselves present as the community of South Shore demands justice for Harith Augustus. We have been present as our community outlines its vision for the future in chants, moments of silence, and impassioned speeches. We are part of the vision of a South Shore that is free from the violence of policing, a neighborhood that is abundant with resources to take care of everyone. Our hopes and dreams are bound up in the future of this neighborhood. So it only makes sense that as our neighbors are dreaming up black futures, they don’t see our existence as indicative of an oppressive past but instead dream of the possibility of us in the future.

Footnotes
¹ Andrews, Gillian “Gus.” “Janelle Monae turns rhythm and blues into science fiction.” io9, July 21, 2010, https://io9.gizmodo.com/5592174/janelle-monae-turns-rhythm-and-blues-into-science-fiction
² Lillvis, Kristen. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2017, 58
³ Schalk, Samantha Dawn. Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, 91
⁴ Butler, Octavia E., et al. Conversations With Octavia Butler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010
⁵ Schaulk, 91
⁶ Lillvis, 80
⁷ Lillvis, 85
⁸ Lillvis, 85
⁹ Lillvis, 79-80
¹⁰ Samudzi, Zoé, William C. Anderson, and Mariame Kaba. As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018
¹¹ Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, 2013
¹² Lillvis, 80

I knew I was different my entire life. Born with a neuromuscular disability, my early childhood involved medical procedures, hospital and doctor visits, and times spent by myself due to social isolation or not being able to keep up with my non-disabled peers when playing.

On one of my birthdays, I received Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like (Four Winds Press, 1976) by Jay Williams and illustrated by Mercer Mayer. This fantastical folk tale blew my mind, starting a lifelong love of fantasy, speculative fiction, and children’s literature. With my body struggling to walk and “maintain strength” this story filled me with power and the central idea that people should never be underestimated.

No longer in print, the story takes place a long time ago in the city of Wu. The main character is a boy named Han who works as a gate-sweeper for the city. A poor orphan, he only receives one cup of wine and a bowl of rice for his labor (he was a child laborer! they gave him wine!). The entire city is in a panic because a messenger alerted the leaders of Wu that an invading army of marauders is on the way. No one knows what to do. All the adults in the room dispense advice from their smug and limited perspectives. Without any clear direction or consensus, they pray to the Cloud Dragon to save them.

The next day “a small, fat man came walking up the hill. He had a long white beard and a shiny bald head, and he leaned on a long staff.” He tells the leaders of Wu that he is the Cloud Dragon and if they give him something to eat and drink he will protect the city. Everyone laughs and mocks him except for Han. Everyone thinks they know what a dragon looks like, though they have never met one, and they are sure that a dragon is NOT a small old man.

As people in the city prepare for invasion, Han offers the old man his daily ration of rice and wine, and shows him hospitality in his little hut. After eating to his content, the old man says to Han, “I don’t think much of the people of Wu… but for your sake I will save the city.”

This is the point where two illustrations by Mercer Mayer swept and shook me. Both the language and text packed a powerful one-two punch to my worldview:

The little fat man puffed out his cheeks. He blew a long breath. The sky grew dark and lightning sizzled from the clouds to the earth. A great wind arose. It caught the Wild Horsemen and blew them far and wide. Those who escaped, turned and galloped madly away through the storm. The sky cleared. The sun shone again. The plain was empty.

I remember it clearly, a black and white illustration showing a human… swirling as a giant cloud. The swirls and magnitude of the cloud deity made the city seem insignificant. Seeing the transformation from a human figure to a force of nature gave me the belief that we all have something inside waiting to emerge.

Once I turned the page the second illustration was even more mind-bending. The cloud deity transforms into a dragon for Han. From puffed soft lines, the cloud deity that looked like the giggling Pillsbury doughboy morphed into a fierce dragon with fangs, claws, and scales, “He was more beautiful and more frightening than anything Han had ever seen.”

The detail of Mayer’s illustrations with Williams’ evocative language transported me to another dimension as a child. I swam deep into Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like. Those two images are as vivid in my memory now from the day I first read the book.

Before A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and everything by Octavia E. Butler, Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like was magical and culturally resonant. The story challenged my assumptions as the title suggests and encouraged me to be kind and open-minded. It also taught me that adults don’t know everything. Teachers and doctors had fixed ideas of what my future was going to be like; they never knew there was an inferno of rage and creativity waiting to leap out.

Books were a refuge for me, as they are for so many marginalized kids. My imagination was an infinite accessible multiverse where I could escape, have fun, learn, absorb, and dream big. Maybe I couldn’t go on the merry-go-round or jump off the diving board, but I could read like a little mofo and question my reality all day long. When I grew up, my sisters and I received books more often than toys for presents. We had two large bookshelves filled with all kinds of stories. I don’t know how my parents selected them, but I am very grateful that we had this personal library at our disposal. What a treasure!

For the last forty years, I’ve been connecting the dots of how the books from my youth shaped me into the person I am today. I hope this journey will be as entertaining as Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.

(Editors’ Note: This essay as it originally appeared in Uncanny’s Year 4 Kickstarter included two images of the Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like illustrations mentioned by Alice Wong, which can be viewed by visiting the Kickstarter Update.)

I cannot think about my disability identity and my love of science fiction separately. They arrived in my life together. While some people have loved SF since they were children or teens, I’m a late bloomer—I didn’t start seriously engaging with SF until I was in my mid-twenties, which was also when I experienced a major health crisis. Both SF and being sick changed me forever. Since I was unable to leave the house or work for any extended periods of time for the first years of my chronic illness, my partner and I began watching a lot of Star Trek. We decided that we would start with the Original Series and watch every episode of every series (including the films) in chronological order. By the time we got to the Next Generation, I had branched out and was reading all the cyberpunk and feminist SF I could manage. From that point on, I knew whatever I was going to do with my life was going to involve SF.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and mental illness, most significantly generalized anxiety disorder, means that I am not able to get out of the house as much I would like. I spend the majority of my days alone (if I did not have my partner, I’d probably spend most of my evenings and weekends alone, too). Even though I am well-loved and supported, my lack of regular face-to-face social interaction can make me feel isolated and lonely. Science fiction fills not only the time when I am unable to work, but also my desire to connect meaningfully with other people. For me, SF is not just books and films; it is a community built on shared interest, and at least for the one with which I associate, a community that embraces people as they are. All of the new friends I’ve made in the past five years have been fellow SF fans and scholars (and most of them are disabled—as many other disabled have people said, we always seem to find each other!). My life is undoubtedly richer for having discovered SF (both the good and the bad).

I’m constantly awed by the power of SF to bring ideas and people together, both in online spaces and in the physical world. Accessing the Future, the disability-themed short story anthology I co-edited with Djibril al-Ayad, would never had happened if Twitter hadn’t brought us together over tweets about feminist cyberpunk. When I attended the Worldcon in Reno I didn’t know anybody in fandom—after a random hallway conversation about feminist SF, I ended up meeting several amazing authors who quickly gave me the lowdown on how to navigate cons, recommended new books to read, and perhaps most importantly, encouraged me to pursue my own work in SF. While I have learned that I don’t do well at large cons, I’ve become good friends with some of those awesome people, and we now support one another through email, Skype, and snail-mail letters.

This is why movements like #accessiblecons matter, why projects like Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction matter. Disabled people have always been a part of the SF/F community. Despite barriers (both cultural and environmental), disabled authors and fans have showed up and pitched in. One of the key rallying cries of disability activism is the recognition and celebration of interdependence (not independence) because no one truly survives by their own labour and effort (think about the roads you use to get around, the food you eat, or the electricity that powers your house—these are organized communal works). Disability is not something new to SF but it is something that needs better accommodations at cons and better representation in its narratives.

SF is a testing ground of possibility as it reflects what (and who) we think is important today. For this reason, I particularly dislike SF narratives that erase disability in future worlds (usually through genetic engineering or other invasive medical procedures). The message such stories tell us is clear: the future is not for you because you shouldn’t even exist now. That hurts. As well, because there will always be people with different levels of ability, such visions of the future are unrealistic. It is important that we talk openly about disability and make sure that disabled people are involved in the conversation. Disability is not a one-size fits all identity, and disabled people experience varying types of barriers and privileges that intersect with race, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. There are still so many stories about disability to tell in SF!

The stories I long to see should not only reflect me, they should reflect the disabled people I know and love as well. I want characters who use canes, who are neuroatypical, who carefully measure out their energy, who need to check the menu for allergens, who take multiple medications—and I want these characters to be as diverse as the world’s population is today. I want utopias that include disability in all its forms (because if we can imagine a world like Zootopia, where animals of all sizes and from all biomes live together, then surely we can imagine some equally amazing adaptive cities for people). I want to watch SF films where disabled characters are three-dimensional and played by disabled actors. These types of stories are wanted and needed. Because representation matters.

Feeling like you belong to a community, or at least feeling like you have a community to go to when you are up for doing so, is important. Both in the real world spaces of today and in the far flung futures of our imaginations, I believe that SF can be this place.

“The Lessons of the Moon” (published in Accessing The Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Kathryn Allan) is in part a story about me and my body. How I coped with loss and disappointment, and the realization that I am disabled. I wrote a protagonist who chooses, in their pain, to become an alien-destroying machine. Part of me yearned so much to be a cyborg or a machine, because my physical body seemed (seems) to be failing me.

I have an invisible disability. No, let’s make that “invisible disabilities.” I pass as normal/able-bodied, but I will let you in on a secret: I was diagnosed with hypertension when I was sixteen. Since then, I have been on anti-hypertension medication. Because of my hypertension, my two pregnancies were “high risk,” coupled with placenta previa. Because of the trauma from my first pregnancy, I also became depressed.

When I was about 39-40, I had granulomatous mastitis which is basically non-cancerous growth in my breast. I was put on steroids by my surgeon. There began the slow, painful, and exhausting healing/recovery process which wreaked havoc on my body, both physically and emotionally. Because of the steroids, I was advised to go off on my anti-depressants. That was not fun.

And because of the prolonged medication, I now have mild fatty liver which I am told is reversible with a strict (read “restricted”) diet. Steroids and painkillers, thanks. `

So, my disabilities are invisible. They are also chronic illnesses I have to deal with for the rest of my life. When I was younger, still shocked by the diagnosis of hypertension, I thought I was truly hampered by this illness. I was weak. Why me? Why now? Why these limits? Why am I trapped within this failing chunk of flesh? It didn’t help that the incredibly sensitive and tactful specialist (not) told me, point blank, that I might just stroke out and die.

Well done, sir. You just frightened a teenager shitless with their future right before them. I changed specialists. My new doctor didn’t have the manners of a brick. I stopped taking bad medical advice, took up tennis, and grew confident. I wrote in school publications. I was happy. I took my medications. I didn’t stroke out. I simply learned to live with the new limits of my body.

Most people who meet me will never know how firm or sudden those limits can be, especially when I’m experiencing a bout of fatigue. When I was recovering from granulomatous mastitis, I struggled with bone-deep fatigue when trying to teach at the same time. I would be writing my lesson plans, teaching 14-year-olds in the morning, and the bone-deep fatigue would remind me about my limits. I would go home by the end of the school day, my body feeling hollowed-out. There were good and bad days. I cherished the good days and loathed the bad days because bad days meant I am not productive, I can’t write, I can’t live normally. I was just blah. My breast surgeon laughed when I told him about this and said that I was his first patient who experienced all the bad side-effects. I was not amused. I did get better. For now, I have annual mammograms done and a yearly appointment to see him.

The hypertension is still there, like a caged and tamed beast. Somnolent and subdued by the meds at most times, I have to watch it lest it bare its fangs and claws.

Part of myself coping with all this came out when I wrote “The Lessons of the Moon” My frustration and sadness wove into the story. I hated my body. I still tear up when I think about the writing process for the story. In fact, I wrote the poem on the day I had my biopsy done. My left breast burned as if it was on fire. The local anesthesia didn’t work. My breast tissue was just too inflamed, according to the surgeon. She was very kind and understanding. After the biopsy, I went to my parents’ to recuperate. In the silence of my dad’s study room, I wrote. In the rest of the story that followed, the pain and disappointment throbbed as undercurrents. As an alien-killing machine, the protagonist is finally free… or are they? Have they made the right choice? Having a cyborg body is tempting, immensely so. Yet, is being part-machine or all-machine the best solution to my problems? Will all my illnesses go away?

It will come back, my breast surgeon reminded me. It will come back. It’s just hiding now, like the hypertension. Cowed, but defiantly clinging on.

My disabilities are invisible. In my country, they are not even considered disabilities. Just chronic and auto-immune illnesses to be managed by healthcare providers. Healthcare’s getting more expensive too. I can’t help but wonder if I’m now a liability in the long run. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Rheumatoid arthritis. They just keep on piling up.

My wish is that people with invisible disabilities would speak up more. We pass as able-bodied. Our bodies remind us otherwise that we are not. Writing “The Lessons of the Moon” taught me that we need to have more SF/F stories about disability, especially invisible disabilities. The story contains my silent anxiety about having an invisible illness which doesn’t really go away, but will only deteriorate over time. May genre fiction hear more of our voices.