Oh yay! I missed this earlier in the week, but The 61st Disability Blog Carnival is up at Writing Mental Illness!
As a writer who helps others write about their experiences with mental illness I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to tell about disability. Because there are many facets (many ways to tell, many different things to tell, and the difference between visible and invisible disabilities among others) to telling disability these posts represent a multiplicity of interpretations of the theme.
Carnival 62 will be hosted at Finding My Way.
I managed to completely miss out on writing that one. Because the theme was originally called “telling disability”. I read through her entire blog in order to try to understand that phrase. I came across one book she mentioned that had a similar phrase (“telling [something or other]”). I googled the book and could not understand the title. I concluded that “telling [Thing X]” must be a phrase with a very specific meaning that was completely lost on me because I was nit familiar with the right kind of people or books. And concluded that there was no way I could take part in the blog carnival. And now I find the title has morphed into “telling about disability” and am even more confused.
Oh it turns out the name of the book was just plain “telling”. Regardless there was no explanation of what “telling disability” meant. I read in phrases rather than words. Phrases like “telling disability” are not only hard for me to comprehend, but something I associate (rightly or wrongly) with a style of writing (much the same one that “writing mental illness” comes from) that goes with a certain kind of artisticness that I have never managed to take part in. So rather than embarrassing myself I just walked away.
(I by no means consider it wrong to use nonstandard phrases, I do it all the time. But even my own writing would often be incomprehensible to me if I were to read it without knowing the experiences it is attached to. And I am easily intimidated when it seems (rightly or wrongly) that I have stumbled into some group of people who all know the meanings when I don’t. Comes from lifelong receptive language trouble and getting laughed at, disbelieved, or told “it means whatever you want it to mean” a lot.)