I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.
When I was born, the wisdom was that homosexuality was an illness; that it was caused largely by somebody's mother, and a distorted relationship with the mother. And now, as I live my life - married t...
I started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel's political importance, that encouraging a nation's citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance,...
Безрадостно чувствовать в себе порчу: ощущать, как в тебе чуть ли не каждый день образуются новые вмятины; знать, что превращаешься в нечто хилое, бессильное; понимать, что значительную часть тебя уне...
Must love them for themselves,
Unusual bodies have been described throughout history as reflections of sin, as omens from the gods, as the basis for laughter or charity or punishment.
The trauma of Down's syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years,...
The Internet, [Judy] Singer said, is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it. For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in...
People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclin...
Mental illness is real illness
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also inf...
Parents often confuse the anomaly of developing fast with the objective of developing profoundly.
[P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.
There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me....
Realitatea faptului că trebuia să îmi pun nu una, ci DOUĂ șosete, și apoi DOI pantofi mă copleșea, și voiam să mă întorc în pat.
I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.
Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it—illness, syndrome, condition—can be almost equally pejorative in...
The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.
The cochlear implant is really a holding mechanism for a larger debate about assimilation versus alienation, about the extent to which standardizing human populations is a laudable mark of progress an...