2:37am May 24, 2014

➸ Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours | Baggs | Disability Studies Quarterly

Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours

Jim Sinclair (1987), who is autistic, intersexed, and asexual, wrote a school essay on xyr personal definition of sexuality. It reads, in part (bolded emphasis mine):

“Sexuality is when someone tells me that I’m not whole, that my personhood is incomplete, that a relationship in which I give everything I have is not "full.” It is hearing that because I have no sexual feelings, I have no feelings; that because I do not feel love in my groin, I cannot feel love at all. It is when someone who has not even bothered to look at my world dismisses it as a barren rock. It is being called inferior to “someone who is human.” It is the denigration of my experiences, my feelings, and my self. It is when my unique faculties are thrown back at me as hopeless inadequacies. Sexuality is reproach.“

Substitute language for sexuality and you get closer than any other author I have read to how I feel when my deepest and most profound experiences are described purely as the lack of language, the lack of thought, even the lack of a soul.

I wrote this article awhile back, and it’s still relevant. I try, as hard as I can, to describe why everything they see as an absence of something is so filled up with the presence of something else, that I can hardly breathe for its beauty. I don’t know whether I succeed or fail, but if you read the full article you can judge for yourself.