Pain is a many-faced beast. Sometimes it roars and sometimes it purrs so quietly you can barely hear it. In spring 2020, it roared. At the height of Covid, I suffered a stroke. I knew pain, but this was new: the struggle to speak, words coming out in the wrong order or not at all. The vertigo. Constantly dropping cups to the point I gave up and started exclusively drinking from plastic beakers taken from the theatres I used to work at.
My body failed me in ways that didn’t fit all my preconceived notions of disability. As an activist raised with the social model that holds that we are disabled by societal barriers and not by our own bodies, was I even disabled – more disabled – by this new but temporary state of affairs? Strokes can be disabling, but I was young and I healed over time.
