Disability and Illness in Arts-Informed Research: Moving Toward ...

I'm not always certain how to approach my vulnerability, and that's an enormous part of this story. What is at our feet that we crush and trample without thought or feeling? We can avoid despair if we don't perceive, we experience relief if we don't see.

I believe my allegiance to imagination and participation in the world encourages a working within which I am allowed to create and to follow. My working and knowing beyond the bounds of théoria is fertile ground; it is wearisome and liberatory knowing the work of planting and cultivation is always at hand. Thought is stubborn and fleeting. I will not be restricted by what is known. Hesitation. Dread, fear, and shame arise in a moment of stopping. If I keep going, I can step over these, leave part of the world. Hesitation is a tightening of muscle, a grimace and pulling back, a constriction of time, a slowing of being.

A sensation arrives as I leave, steps into the elevator before the woman who exits two floors below mine. I am tense, my language is tense. Habitual movements of tongue against tooth and lip produce sounds, syllables repeat, they stutter and tumble from this toothy gap as words. Impaled upon the page by a tense artist. Lines begin to gather. Patience. Await the arrival of image, work. Know these most often creep in through the dreamer's gate.