I woke this morning* a little past four with searing pain and horrible cramps. I used to have extremely unpleasant periods when I was younger, but they have gotten better with time and age, to the point that I hardly notice the discomfort these days (the fact that I consider the feeling of someone stabbing me with a knife from below at random moments to be an entirely acceptable thing to experience on a regular basis probably says something about the way women are conditioned in a patriarchal society, but never mind). In fact, I had forgotten it so thoroughly that I didn’t even have suitable painkillers at home when ’women’s trouble’ struck this night.

Pain and disease have always seemed to me universal, levelling experieces. Of course, money and status can buy you better healthcare, but when you are in pain, you are in pain just like any other human. And there’s a primal quality to it – almost everything I do on the daily basis is far removed from how humans existed in the past. But pain, I assume, was much the same for them, too.

I am not often sick and most of the time, my body and mind function very well – or to be more accurate, close to what is considered well, or normal. So when something does happen to interrupt this smooth existence, I monitor it with fascination and even a certain romanticism. I still remember having pneumonia years ago, being so tired and delirious that I lost days in a daze, while somehow feeling very connected to my body and other human beings. But as soon as I’m better, I seem to forget the experience entirely, snapping back to the ‘normal’ baseline.

A couple of years ago, something strange happened to my back and hip, making me almost immobile and causing significant pain. For a few days, this turned my life upside down. I had to take some hard-core painkillers to be able to attend a very important event. When they wore off, I was miraculously fine again and promptly forgot that just a day ago, I was not able to get dressed on my own.

The reason I’m thinking about pain and disability now (apart from my night of horror) is that I have recently finished Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body and am currently reading/listening to Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. There is a lot to unpack in those books, especially if – like me – you are rather new to thinking about disability and ableism. One thing that struck me especially forcefully, though, is how rigid the boxes for ablebodied and disabled tend to be. We are labelled either one or the other, completely disregarding the fact that we move between different degrees of ability throughout our lives, that we can become (temporarily) severely impaired due to illness or injury, and most of us will become disabled in the and, as we grow old.

In Taussig’s book, there is a boy, a successful athlete who wants to drop her course on disability, because he thinks the topic doesn’t relate to him in any way. I want to yell at him and remind him that injuries are an ever-present threat in sports, does he really not see a connection there? Does he have no relatives or acquaintances with a chronic illness or disability (in addition to the obvious example of his teacher in the wheelchair), no one with depression or anxiety, no one who has badly broken a leg, suffers from migraines or, for that matter, wears glasses?

My frustration with him is, I believe, entirely justified. But as is often the case, it’s instructive to look at your own righteous anger and examine it a bit more closely. Because in my own way, I have been doing exactly the same: believing that the experiences of disabled people are entirely other, that there is no overlap, that I couldn’t possibly understand. What a failure of imagination. While I certainly cannot, based on my current exposure to life, fully comprehend what it means to be paralysed or autistic, I live in a body and have a mind. And we are all in this box together.

*The morning in question was in fact already a few days ago, but it has taken time to get published.

The image is taken on a quiet night in Bruges last weekend.