Sitting Pretty

I decided to read a non-fiction book this time and I chose one by Rebekah Taussig called Sitting Pretty; The View From My Ordinary, Resilient, Disabled Body.  Rebekah has a Ph.D. in disability studies and lives in Kansas. She uses a wheelchair and has an Instagram account called sittingpretty. She writes about what it is like to be paralyzed since the age of three. Her memoir is warm and funny and sometimes sad. As I read the book I thought about a woman who worked at the same building that I worked, back when I worked. She parked in the handicapped spot near my window. I would watch her arrive in the morning, twist in her seat, haul the main part of wheelchair over her lap to the open door. She would snap on both wheels with practiced precision and haul herself onto the seat, gather her things, and wheel inside. In the afternoon she transferred into her car, took off one wheel and then the other, hauled the wheelchair over her lap between her body and the steering wheel, shut the door and drive off. She was a strong woman to haul those awkward pieces back and forth from the back seat. I thought of her as strong and independent. Rebekah Taussig also seems strong and independent. She talks about ableism which is the mindset that typical abilities are better than and more important than less than typical abilities. I understand what she means. She wrote about her first year of teaching high school. Besides English she taught a disability class. She tried to get her students to understand ableism and with some students she got no where. Her frustration with that felt very real. She writes about people who mean to be kind but aren't. If a person sees her getting in or out of her car offers help she will tell them she can do it herself.  She has a system. If they stay and watch, ready to help her when she falls, they aren't being kind anymore because they didn't respect her answer. This was a good book to read because it opened my eyes to ableism in my own life.