Where to Start Reading About Disability

This is the #1 book that I recommend to anyone looking to learn more about what it’s like to live with a disability. Disability Visibility emphasises that there is no one way to be disabled. Disabled people come from a diverse range of backgrounds and have a virtually unlimited range of experiences. These essays also illustrate the many challenges that disabled people face on a daily basis, including everything from navigating public transit to finding a college that is adequately prepared to educate disabled students.

If you have a uterus, you’ve probably experienced it behaving badly. But for people with endometriosis, their uteruses take “behaving badly” to a whole new level. In 2010, Abby Norman was a college student who lived a life full of dancing and time with friends. But when she suddenly started experiencing intense pain, weight loss, and brain fog, she went to the doctor for help. But he insisted that she just had a UTI and sent her home with antibiotics. Norman didn’t get better, eventually dropping out of college and piecing together ways to support herself as she continued to experience debilitating pain. Ask Me About My Uterus was the first book that I ever read that delved into endometriosis—a condition I was on my own journey of figuring out—and I’d rarely before felt so seen.

Having grown up with chronic daily headaches and migraines, I was intimately familiar with the impact that brain injuries can have on the whole body. But when I picked up Annie Liontas’s book, their writing gave me a big-picture look at the long-term, serious negative health outcomes for people who have experienced concussions. Liontas shares their experience of having multiple concussions in a short period of time and how they struggled to recover in ways they never expected. I’d never read anything like it before, and now I recommend it to anyone looking to better understand brain injuries.