my 2nd disability-versary

Content warning: COVID, medical neglect/abuse/gaslighting/murder. Despite the fun hero image, this is not a feel-good piece.

August 9, 2025.

Five years five months since That Week In March ™, two years since I tested positive for COVID - or more importantly, two years since I last drove my car properly or walked around a park without taking rest breaks every 500m or left the house to do an activity without fear or spent over 50% of the day out of bed - and zero days since I last called a GP clinic begging them to grant an appointment to a multiply disabled community member who is too sick to eat or drink due to an acute COVID infection and was turned away from the hospital because they thought it was all in his head and that if he just “stopped complaining” and “tried harder” he’d be able to weather the infection out at home.

The pandemic, evidently, is very much not over.

I wanted to write something today inspired by a favourite artwork from Britchida - The Things I Miss; The Things I Don’t. A reflection on not just all the bullshit of the past two years, but all the invaluable people, skills, community, love and time I have gained.

But I can’t. I’m too tired. Too angry. Angry at ableist doctors, a descriptor fit for almost every single one of them. Angry at power-hunger politicians, at their servitude to the rich and the status quo. Angry at everyone not devoting as much of their being as possible to fixing this shit (and by this shit i don’t just mean covid but EVERYTHING). Angry at everyone I love who won’t wear a fucking mask. At my grandma for trying to convince my sister to take her’s off.

It’s hard being this angry in so fragile a body. The thing with myalgic encephalomyelitis is that any emotion that gets too big turns into suffering that you might carry with you for the rest of your life. Not just anger. Not just hurt, sadness, grief. But joy. Love. Excitement. Love.

But I carry it all anyway.

The biggest thing I’ve felt over the past two years is insane. I feel insane. I genuinely feel like I am fucking crazy and living in a different reality to everyone around me and like me and my disabled sick queer trans activist-from-bed friends are in some kind of twisted unreality that we’ve made up because if things were actually this bad then surely, surely everyone would have noticed. If 1 in 5 cases of COVID lead to long term or permanent symptoms and biological damage, if everyone is catching COVID once a year or more, if people who do catch COVID can get so sick with it they can‘t chew food and even when they do everything that everyone says they’re supposed to do and call 000 and go to hospital they get turned away and told to go home and suck it up…… surely EVERYONE WOULD NOTICE !!!!!!! RIGHT ?!?!?!!!!!

And they do. People do notice. They say “why am I sick all the time?” they say “I’ve just been so much more tired than usual recently lol” they say “yeah everyone i know is really going Through It rn mercury must be in retrograde” they say “my cancer came back” they say “concentrating is really hard these days rip i guess tiktok killed my attention span” and they don’t join the goddamn dots.

And even if people do join the dots, good fucking luck getting them to do anything about it when doing something means making things hard and awkward for them socially.

But I digress. Anyone could have written this two years ago. People were writing this shit two years ago - more than. The disabled community’s grief is not new - and I include all covid-aware-and-acting-like-it people in that community, because a community includes those who care about you.

A piece I think about a lot on this is You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths by disabled Asian writer Mia Mingus. And it was written in January. 2022.

The current book I’m reading, The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, was also published in 2022. Many of the essays were written long before then. The whole book is about COVID, and the parts of the book that aren’t about COVID are about all the QTBIPOC disabled rage and genius and medical neglect and government sanctioned murder and their community and love and survival despite it all and - i cannot stress this enough - what I have been doing for the past few years is what disabled people, particularly queer, trans disabled people of colour have been doing for centuries.

Don‘t just listen to what I have to say on it. Go read Mia’s essay. Go read Leah’s book. Go join a climate change lobbying group or a local community mutual aid group or literally anything you care about where you use your time and energy - if you have it - to bring some good into the world.

I am sick and I am tired and I am angry and I love my life and even so I want it to be BETTER !!!! For everyone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah.

Happy disability anniversary to me. Maybe next year I’ll throw a party.