Crip Time

Sara Hendren interviewed by Krista Tippet on On Being. 

Because to be vulnerable in time, that is Graham’s chief vulnerability and disability, that he is not pacing through school in a way that makes him into an economic citizen. That really is what we’re talking about. It’s quickness and speed in order to be recognizably productive and therefore valuable as a taxpayer and a worker. The disability is needfulness on the state and also needfulness on other people in a distinctive way.

And so, that time, that atypical way of maneuvering through time, yes, has helped all of us in our family to see what are we attached to in our worth and what will we do? How will we build the kind of lives that we want? Not just for ourselves, but in our communities where economic worth is one piece of who many of us are, but where the human family is a much bigger thing.

“Crip time” is this term of art in disability studies that I learned from other disability scholars. And it is that acknowledgment, the kind of slowness that comes with a lot of conditions — aging, but also maybe maneuvering with gear. And again, making friends with that slowness and trying to ask ourselves, “Well, what is the hurry about? Do we want our lives subsumed by our economic worth?” Again, none of this is to say that we don’t, in a realistic way, live in a time in which we work for money. Yes, I get it. But, the invitation is also to ask what are our lives about.