Pathways 2015 brought a diverse group of blind and visually impaired youth from all over Chicagoland. Students began by meeting the Pathways staff, reuniting with friends from previous summers, as well as meeting new friends.
I write and speak out even when it hurts, even if it means being judged, because it is far better than atrophying inside from silence and denial. And who knows? Maybe someone who reads one of my stories will finally find the courage to free themselves, too, from whatever blanket they hide under.
"Amir Rabiyah opens the show with a spoken word exploration of being queer, disabled, trans and juggling multiple identities. In a prayer, Rabiyah implores listeners to stop asking chronically ill to ‘get well soon’. “Being sick forever terrifies people,” Rabiyah says, and dozens of snapping fingers echo the sentiment."
They didn't admit me to the psych ward that time. They let me go home at three in the morning. I took a taxi back to the building and wondered why I was still alive. It wasn't a 'I'm going to try and kill myself again' type of wonder. Just an idle wondering of what the point of my life was. I didn't make a difference. I didn't matter.
I'm 31 and all this manifested from whispers of my name whilst sitting in front of my art locker in high school. Whispers of Anna, Anna. Back then I was 16, and maybe all this started when I was younger. A time when I would obsessively ask myself, why aren't I a squirrel? Self awareness, self existence seems to always dance in my head from time to time.
My teacher signed to my class, throughout the year, how accepting the deaf were of people outside of the deaf community and reminded us if the deaf participants signed too fast, at the events, to tell them to slow down and to inform them that we were beginning signers.
Learning that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with me took years. And along with that, I learned many other things, vital life lessons that I should have been taught as a child. I learned how to say I wasn’t okay. I learned how to fight back. I learned how to be angry. I learned how to be me, an agender asexual bisexual person with Bipolar II and an eating disorder. I learned how to scream. I learned how to love.
I just wasn't getting it, I thought. Then I met Tina and she reframed my train of thought. “Depression is like a disease,” she sympathized as tears rolled down my cheek one at a time as if they wanted to be fair and give each other recognition; my family didn’t acknowledge this statement. Depression was something that was trumped and not coddled.
How did I get HPV? I have no idea. Web MD tells me that nearly every sexually active person will get HPV in their lifetime. That is comforting to know, but as a 20 something young woman who is otherwise healthy and has never really "gotten around" it is also infuriating.
Imagine feeling that while lying in bed, immobile, seeing nothing with your eyes wide open. You are not sad, you are simply defective, like a toy whose power switch is turned on but someone cut the wire to its outer circuits...These time periods make me feel like the atmosphere has thickened into a hyper-stimulating suffocating fume of numbing panic because I can’t put my finger on exactly what is wrong or what’s happening to me, but I can’t shake that my whole body feels dysfunctional. Every part of my day becomes affected. Every part of me shuts down in response.