I don’t have any more news about Becoming Sweetwood yet, and everything I’ve heard about the publishing process has prepared me for this. I’m in it for the long haul and it’s out of my control, so I’m not impatient. I’m just quietly writing down the changes I want to make in my notes so that I’ll be ready to edit it when I get round to it. I find large gaps between edits where life can happen actually really helpful in bringing fresh perspectives to the writing.

I’m aware that we’re always learning and have the chance to change no matter what age we are. It always makes me wonder when I hear stereotypes of older people “not liking change.” I feel that change is a part of life we need to learn how to accept sooner rather than later, and people of any age can not like it. As Remy says to his dad in Disney’s Ratatouille (2007) when his dad (they’re rats and Remy wants to be a human chef) says “you can’t change nature,” “change is nature, dad.” Obviously some changes are much much more drastic than others, but at least we always have room to grow. Becoming Sweetwood is all about changing and waiting and growing, so I had better live out the messages my story tells and wait in expectation of change.

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I’ve been thinking about models of disability. The Social Model of Disability is very famous and preached by disability advocates all over, and I’m very interested in how disability and identity are configured in it. As opposed to the Medical Model, which says that your body is the problem that needs to be fixed, the Social Model says that it is society that needs to change, not you. I love the Social Model as much as the next Disabled person, but I can’t help but see some of its limitations. Sometimes an area is inaccessible and it’s not the built environment’s fault. A forest is not a built environment. Nothing anymore can change to make nature more accessible. And how society is built has little impact on pain or chronic illness.

And the “Medical Model” is a very Western clinical take on medicine. I find myself thinking about a book that has really influenced me called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman, about Eastern versus Western approaches to disability. I read this book before I became Disabled and had already read and seen how some disabilities were revered in some parts of rural India. The 1997 book is about a Lao refugee community in America and how they look after their daughter who has epilepsy. In the Hmong Tribe, epilepsy is a marker of spirituality, a holy person, a view which was at odds with the American medical system. Disability is treated so differently across the globe, something I am fascinated by, especially in seeing how people from different cultural backgrounds treat me personally as a Disabled person.

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The strangest encounters to do with my disability often happen to me with people who are from different cultures. Some guy once assumed I was begging because he didn’t look up from his phone when I said “excuse me.” I’m aware that I’m often the first experience they might have of a wheelchair-user (well, I’m often people’s first in-person experience no matter what their culture is). I’m too interested in their reactions to be offended. When I was doing my MA and living on campus, there were a lot of Indian students who I know had never seen someone like me before. I lived in India in my gap year after school, so I’ve seen the world is like in developing countries, and I get how hard it would be to be an independent wheelchair-user there. Like most wheelchair-users, I’ve had people come up and tell me I inspire them, which I don’t think they really need to say out loud, but I get it. It’s funny how people are inspired by something they don’t see often. I don’t think they’d be that impressed it was more common to see people independently accessing a society not built for them. Kind of like Ratatouille.



(Featured Image is concept art from Disney’s 2007 film Ratatouille)