For Tad-y, Borlongan, and Lacson, the seemingly fatal predicament of living with disability is negated by the inertia of hope, in various yet similar forms. The first few lines of Borlongan’s final poem ‘Until Believed (Hanggang Paniwalaan)’ have a bleak outlook on the life of a person with disability:
To be disabled is to be mocked to be shouted at in the streets pelted with insults reprimanded by the guard refused at restaurants denied purchase barred entrance locked out. (Ang kapansanan ay ang laitin ang sigawan sa daan, ang tapunan ng insulto ang sitahin ng gwardya ang tanggihan sa resto ang hindi pagbilhan ang hindi papasukin ang pagsaraduhan) (69, 72)
However, far from resignation, the persona concludes with an inner resolve to change the status quo:
To be disabled is to dare to challenge everyone to question their own beliefs and to change the order of things. To be disabled is just a part of me. Not the whole of me. (Ang kapansanan ay ang magtangkang hamunin ang lahat na usigin ang sariling paniniwala baguhin ang kaayusan. Ang kapansanan ay bahagi ko lamang. Hindi ang aking kabuuan) (71, 74)
The calcification of this conviction comes from another poem in the collection, ‘The Movement (Ang Kilusan)’, where Borlongan mentions that his participation in social movements has shown him that he can be accepted “[n]o matter what the physical limitations are.” (65) These passages reveal that the opportunity to hope and dream outside and beyond the experience of disability is strongly made possible by community support, as much as social and institutional support are necessary.
Tad-y’s work similarly displays the centrality of community in recovery. She opens her collection with ‘Episode’, a recollection in the aftermath of a manic episode, which the reader can assume is what led to her confinement. In the poem, the persona is not alone. Her parents visit her in “the lunchroom.” (3) Later, in ‘Mangroves’ Tad-y likens her support network to the bakhawan, which are “protection against the onslaught of storms.” (27) The storms which have ravaged her own life may be similarly strong, but she remains anchored to the earth by the people who care for her.
Tad-y’s groundedness allows her to interrupt the moments she looks back – to the Philippines and its attending anxieties; on her episodes and consequent confinement – with ruminations for the future. At the beginning of ‘Blue and Yellow Road’, we find Tad-y speaking about her desire to teach yoga, despite having some apprehension about her capacity: “[d]espite all my defenses … I would like to teach yoga but I am scared because how can I expect people to trust me with their bodies when I can’t even trust my own mind.” (52) I point here to the persona’s forward-looking desire for something that is beyond her confinement, despite her cautiousness. Like Borlongan, it is the consistency of the presence of her community that has allowed her to get there.
Lacson also ends her book with ‘NOTE [Like many other disabled people,]’, with a call for radical care:
As I think to the future—one in which I am inevitably still reliant on medication, and the care work of others—I return to Berlant, who casts existence in the after as ‘not wounded or healed life but in the process: the time of gathering [and] wandering.’ I content that part of this gathering entails being-with each other in ways that remake resistance and repair, a menace to our enemies and a means to mend communities. When you spend every day asking others for help, you learn to cherish care as an idiom of belonging—one that is political as much as it is intimate. (117)
Lacson frames the concept of people’s interdependence on each other as a form of solidarity, one that we cannot live without because of both the inevitable physical wearing away of the body due to age or disability and the need to find other ways of being and living – not simply surviving – in a social structure bent on alienating the human experience. The final throughline connecting the annotations in Unbecoming thus becomes community care as resistance.
Tad-y, Borlongan, and Lacson’s reflections on their lives have allowed not only their own experiences, but a different view of disability to come to the fore. Without erasing the difficulty and uncertainty that are part of living with disability, the three authors reveal that community, care, and belonging are alternative ways of being in the world. Each stresses the point that people live on a reciprocal kind of kindness; if we are to build a better world, we must take care of each other.
To me, their writing about disability both challenges and utilises coherence. On the one hand, their work organises the experience of disability into a narrative that captures those very experiences; however, the nature of such experiences cannot fully be captured in text. There is a life lived beyond it that escapes the narrative, but which isn’t any less important. On the other hand, by writing about disability, they are able to make sense of their lives within the confines of these social scripts (i.e., the discrimination and stigma against disability, but also the experience of being made invisible) yet still present possibilities outside it, altering the very nature of what that coherent social script should look like. In sum, writing about disability exceeds being ‘coherent’ to meet social expectations because it inevitably confronts emotions and experiences otherwise left buried by social scripts of ‘normalcy’ (i.e., able-bodied and able-mindedness) and presents alternative visions for a person living with disability who is not magically ‘cured,’ one where they are constantly remaking and making new sense of their life.
In locating my experiences in similar literature, friends advised me to see if I was ready to share something so vulnerable with a reader, and to first learn the language with which I wanted to convey that depth. There are many ways to write about and around ‘sensitive’ topics, like mental illness, disability, or trauma. Mostly because these are things people don’t usually bring up about themselves as conversation starters.
Roxane Gay recalls trauma in writing as something far from pleasant: “I was not only writing a memoir of my body; I was forcing myself to look at what my body has endured . . . I’ve cut myself wide open. I am exposed. That is not comfortable. That is not easy.” (10) Others like Grace Talusan, on the other hand, share their stories as a form of catharsis, both for themselves and for others who carry similar experiences: “For most of my life I believed I was a bad person because something bad happened to me. I had to learn that I was not bad. I tell my story now in the hope that it will do the same for others, create an opening for their own stories and alleviate those feelings of aloneness.” (147)
I personally started off with a tendency to want to bring the reader with me back to the moment of psychosis, to the rawest possible form of feeling and emotion. The problem with that is that it leaves the chronology of things upended, as if I were talking about a very intimate inside joke to someone who’s not supposed to be there. The reader, whose only knowledge of my life will be through the window of the essay or work that I come up with, must be guided to help them understand where I’m coming from and to avoid a solipsistic method of writing about deeply personal things. In effect, I produce a cohesive narrative, one that is palatable enough to the outsider looking in on my life while maintaining the integrity of my experiences.
It’s great writing advice. But that’s not always the experience of living with disability – rarely is the logic or emotion of it neat; rarely is the resolution linear, if we arrive at any form of it at all. As a person living with a mental illness, my thoughts aren’t always ready to be written in language, the somatic manifestations of my illness prevent even the body from making sense of itself.
Yet, in a way, I find the opportunity to reflect and organise my experiences into strings of comprehensible phrases to be a privilege in itself, one, however, that is also not constitutive of the entire range of experiences of all persons with disability. Similar to the authors I have written about, to write one’s experiences on disability on a good day is an approximation of the coherence that society demands us to explain ourselves with. This is not a sleight-of-hand in one’s ability. It’s a struggle to get those words out there, to relay the pain and frustration, and care and love in the experience of living with disability. In the gap between approximation, however, those who write about disability create a possibility for something entirely new to grow.
I often make 2021 my point of reference in my writing. I started submitting to publications in 2023, but I moved back into my family home two years prior, and that was when I wrote the most. Looking back at that time, there was no silver lining to most of the entries. My father had just passed away and I was a contractual employee without social benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was seeing a psychiatrist intermittently, because my mental illness made it difficult to function in the job that I needed to pay for my family’s daily expenses, but too many sessions would inevitably deplete my bank account.
Things began to let up when I left my job later that year and started freelancing. I relied on the kindness of friends who recommended me to gigs, and on my family’s support in helping with the housework. Somewhere, something shifted. I got a new full-time job that compensated me enough to let me see a doctor and a therapist regularly, and buy enough medication for consistent recovery from grief and burnout. In that place, and in my other support networks, I found people who encouraged me to write about hope. For the first time, I was moving out of the circular despair that had lived in me for so long. Much of it is circumstantial, I think. Had there been no one to help me, I wouldn’t find myself writing at all. There would be no space for writing in my life, which would probably be subsumed to the immediate demands of survival.
I write in my piece, ‘Note to a Friend’ that “[r]eality has been more difficult to discern recently. For instance, maybe I did put in the limp kangkong too early, and now they have unnecessarily bittered the supposedly sour broth . . . I had thought to put in some to flavor my concoction, but I couldn’t find any in the kitchen.”
In this part letter, part recipe for sinigang, and part confession of my struggle with my mental illness, I tell the reader, my friend, that “I’ve been trying to cook again[,]” a recent attempt, though it is with some difficulty: “Remember when I absent-mindedly burnt the rice the one time I had you over for dinner? I thought then that I wasn’t made for cooking, that I would never get better. So I don’t know why I’m here again. But I somehow feel now that there will be a next time to improve my skill.” Ultimately, the piece does conclude with the hope I feel in the present: “Your recommendations helped me find odd jobs, and those have helped me with a more regular rhythm to when I take my pills. It is true when they say one could not survive without the kindness of others. Without it, I wouldn’t be here in the smoky kitchen, scooping up the soup to taste.”
Though its trajectory is not without relapses, I am allowed a number of attempts to try again, because I carry with me the belief and love and support of all those who have known and held me. I sustain the optimism to the end, and leave the reader with the promise of tomorrow.
