Contraindicated

Disability Doesn't Make You Smaller

When normies talk about disability making people "smaller," they're projecting their own fear onto our bodies. They imagine shrinking, disappearing, becoming less. They're wrong.

Losing mobility doesn't make me smaller. If anything, I occupy substantially more space: physically and conceptually: especially to unwilling third-party witnesses of my disturbing degradation. Every day I traumatize my neighbors by wobbling past them. Sometimes I fall in front of them. Sometimes they see the leg braces for the first time and their faces do that thing where they're trying not to stare while absolutely staring.

It does not make me smaller. If anything it makes me more impactful. And I physically take up more space now.

I cannot make myself physically smaller anymore because I can't fold like that anymore.

My lifelong experience as a white woman in America: the constant physical negotiation of making myself compact, convenient, unobtrusive: can no longer be fulfilled. I can no longer package myself neatly in public spaces so men can spread their legs out for their comfort. My body requires room now. My cane requires clearance. My wobble demands a buffer zone.

Being in a wheelchair will make me shorter, yes. But it will not make me physically smaller or reduce the physical impact my existence has on the world around me. Especially the experience of all the human beings who witness my being in that chair.

The Contagion of Vicarious Trauma

One of the things I'm working through in my writing is the vicarious trauma of disability: how contagious it is when I wake up a little bit worse. When people witness my degradation, they're not just seeing me struggle. They're confronting their own mortality, their own fragility, the inevitability that bodies fail. I become a walking memento mori, except I'm not walking well and that's the whole fucking problem.

In Central Asia, my requiring more space to sit, walk, move, exist: everything in modesty: did not socially inconvenience people from a society where the inevitability of aging and disability was accepted. But in the US, me having the audacity to inflict my imperfect physicality outside of my apartment is a taboo that takes up too much conceptual space.

That my face can look so "normal" while my legs and torso ragdoll like an Oblivion NPC is alarming as fuck to people. I am not just "oh, a pretty cripple" or "the young wobbly woman." I am a deadass freak of nature to some people. That mismatch between appearance and function is so unnatural to witnesses that sometimes I feel guilty for disturbing them when I just want to go to the corner store for a can of seltzer.

Disability Warps In-Groups

One genre of witness I love: tourists in NYC who witness me talking about walkers and wheelchairs with 80+ year old "normal" mobility-disabled commuters. They see how neighborly New Yorkers are, how much we benefit from sharing space for 10 minutes with a fellow traveler on the bus. They watch us trade tips about which subway stations have working elevators, which corner store owners will help carry your shit, which blocks have the smoothest sidewalks.

Disability warps the concept of who is in-group for you and what a stranger really is. An 82-year-old Dominican woman with a walker is my people now. We're in the same club. She tells me about her knees. I tell her about my spine. We compare notes on physical therapy and agree most of it is bullshit. The tourist watches this interaction like we're performing some kind of ritual they don't have the script for.

Because in America, we're supposed to pretend our bodies don't fail. We're supposed to be small, convenient, invisible when we're struggling. We're supposed to disappear into our homes when we can't perform able-bodied normalcy anymore.

But I take up space. I wobble through the bodega. I fall in front of my neighbors. I traumatize commuters with my ragdoll torso and my pretty face that doesn't match my fucked-up gait. I make people uncomfortable by existing visibly, by refusing to be smaller, by insisting that my body: in all its failing, degrading, MS-ravaged glory: belongs in public.

Disability doesn't make you smaller. It makes you unavoidable. And that's what scares people.

Dear Livejournal: Feet

My toes are changing length and it's the most Cronenberg body horror experience I've had with MS so far.

I can cope with bladder stuff getting weird since 2018-2019. I've adapted to needing a squatty potty and using a TENS unit to recondition my pelvic floor muscles just to urinate properly when I "don't feel right." Now with diagnostic clarity I've made peace with the fact that my spine lesions mean "going to the bathroom" is now a whole production instead of a basic bodily function and it will get worse and become more of a regular (har har) daily challenge rather than an alarming episodic degradation. Right now, as of January 2026: it's manageable. It's a problem I can solve with positioning, equipment, and patience. And tall toilets are an American crime against humanity now and forever.

But my feet changing proportions in 2024? That's different. That's visceral horror in a way toilet dysfunction isn't.

My toes are literally different lengths than they were before. The bones haven't changed; the muscle wasting and nerve damage have redistributed how my toes sit, how they articulate, how they look. I put my feet up and stare at them sometimes because they don't look like MY feet anymore. They look like feet that belong to someone with different genes telling their feet how long pointer toes are, or worse yet someone older, sicker, further along in degradation than I'm ready to accept.

The Kafka Problem: Waking Up Wrong

There's a scene in The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into an insect and his first concern is whether he'll make it to work on time. Not "why am I a bug," but "how do I maintain my routine as a bug." That's disability accrual in a nutshell. You wake up a little more wrong each day and your brain scrambles to normalize it, to fit it into your existing framework of self, to maintain the fiction that you're still fundamentally you.

My feet are my Gregor Samsa moment. They're the thing that broke through the normalization, the adaptation, the "well this is just my life now" coping mechanism I've developed for every other degradation. Getting to work is still my apex worry most days.

I've watched my handwriting deteriorate. I've felt my gait destabilize. I've experienced my cognitive processing slow to a crawl. All of these were incremental enough that I could adjust, compensate, accommodate.

But feet?

Feet are supposed to be stable. Feet are your foundation, your literal ground-level interface with the world. They're not supposed to morph on you while you're just trying to exist.

The Fly: Incremental Transformation as Horror

In Cronenberg's The Fly, Jeff Goldblum's character doesn't transform all at once. It's gradual. Pieces of him fall off. New pieces emerge. He documents it with scientific detachment at first, then dawning horror, then desperate bargaining with his own biology. And yes, Jeff Goldblum is unfairly attractive even while portraying body horror, which is a whole separate essay about millennial formative crushes and the erotics of intellectual curiosity, but I digress.

The point is: the horror isn't in the final form. The horror is in watching yourself become something else piece by piece, and being conscious enough to witness and document your own transformation.

For some people, their disability is The Fly in slow motion. It's Kafka without the dramatic overnight reveal. It's incremental transformation that happens slowly enough that each individual change seems manageable, adaptable, not that bad really, until you look down at your own feet and realize you don't recognize them anymore.

It's not rational. Objectively, complex bladder dysfunction is way more disabling than toe length changes. Neurogenic bladder affects my daily function, my ability to work, my quality of life. Changed toe proportions are cosmetic at worst, a minor balance issue at best.

But there's something about looking down at your own feet, feet you've had your whole life, feet that have carried you through every major life event, feet you know as intimately as your own face, and seeing them morph into something unfamiliar that hits different. It's the uncanny valley of your own body. It's recognizing that the meat you've inhabited for 40-some odd years is not a fixed entity but a mutable thing, subject to forces you cannot control.

Maybe it's because feet are foundational in both the literal and metaphorical sense. They're what grounds you. They're what you stand on when everything else is falling apart. They're supposed to be stable.

When your feet start shapeshifting, what's left that's safe from transformation?

Body Horror as Chronic Condition

Many disabilities are body horror. Not the Hollywood kind with tentacles and gore and dramatic reveals, but the slow-motion Cronenberg kind where your own flesh betrays you incrementally until you don't recognize yourself anymore. It's the Kafka kind where you wake up wrong and have to figure out how to go to work anyway. It's the kind where you document your own degradation with scientific detachment because what else can you do?

I have pictures of my feet from years ago. Normal feet. Unremarkable feet. Feet that did their job without requiring conscious thought or adaptation. I look at those pictures now and they look like they belong to someone else. Someone who didn't know yet. Someone still living in the before-time when bodies were reliable and feet stayed the same shape.

The toes are just the most visible manifestation of what's happening throughout my entire body. Muscle wasting. Nerve damage. Spinal lesions redistributing function and form in ways that make me incrementally unrecognizable to myself. But something about the feet makes it real in a way the rest doesn't.

Maybe tomorrow I'll make peace with it. Maybe I'll adapt. Maybe it'll become just another item on the long list of ways my body has transformed since my thoracic spine decided to become a lesion repository.

But today, I'm staring at my feet like Gregor Samsa staring at his insect legs, trying to reconcile what I'm seeing with what I know should be there.

Body horror. Slow-motion transformation. The Cronenberg reality of chronic progressive illness.

At least Jeff Goldblum made it look compelling.

The Cute Incontinence Product Economy

I've been watching the incontinence product market shift since 2020 and I can't tell if it's millennial aesthetic rebranding, Long COVID consequences, workplace conditions finally breaking women's bodies, or all three at once.

Suddenly we have period underwear companies pivoting to bladder leak products, social media ads for "discreet" incontinence wear with millennial packaging aesthetics, content creators normalizing "a little leakage" as just part of postpartum or fitness or sneezing, and rebranding of adult diapers as "leak-proof underwear" with targeted ads to women 25-45.

This wasn't the market landscape in 2018 when my neurogenic bladder started. Back then, incontinence products were marketed to elderly women or postpartum mothers. The aesthetic was medical, clinical, shameful and/or temporary. You bought them at pharmacies in depressing beige or that clinical powder blue/purple packaging that said "your body has failed, please be sexless and demure."

Now? Subscription services. Cute patterns. Influencer partnerships. Normalization campaigns about how "1 in 3 women experience bladder leakage," a statistic that definitely wasn't circulating pre-2020.

So What Changed?

Theory 1: Millennial aesthetic capitalism found a new market. We're the generation that rebranded therapy, antidepressants, and chronic illness into something Instagram-friendly. Why not incontinence? Slap some millennial pink on it, get a few influencers to talk about "normalizing bodies," create a DTC subscription model, profit.

Theory 2: Long COVID is creating a massive increase in dysautonomia, pelvic floor dysfunction, and neurological issues that include bladder control problems. Suddenly there's a huge demographic of younger women who need these products and the market is responding.

Theory 3: More and more women work demanding jobs where they face consequences for using the bathroom outside of the corporate schedule. Amazon warehouses. Call centers. Hellish offices where bathroom breaks are monitored, timed, counted against you. I've worked through enough of these environments to know: when you can't leave your station without risking discipline, your body adapts. Or breaks. Or both. Have you considered not hydrating at work?

Theory 4: All of the above. Millennial marketing meeting actual medical need from a pandemic wreaking havoc on autonomic nervous systems, compounded by workplace pressures that treat basic bodily functions as theft of company time.

I've been having increasing bladder issues since 2018-2019 because my thoracic spine lesions created neurogenic bladder. I was early to this party, and not by choice. Watching the market expand and rebrand around me is surreal. On one hand, normalization is good. More products means more options, better quality, less shame. On the other hand, the reason for the market expansion is concerning.

If Long COVID is creating enough bladder dysfunction in younger women to justify an entire aesthetic rebranding of incontinence products, that's a public health crisis being quietly absorbed into consumer capitalism. If workplace pressures are so hostile to basic human needs that women are developing incontinence from holding their bladders for entire shifts, that's labor exploitation being repackaged as a product opportunity.

We're not talking about either as medical crises or labor rights violations. We're talking about them as lifestyle product categories.

And maybe that's the most dystopian part: we've gotten so good at aesthetic management of chronic illness and workplace constraints that we can rebrand mass disability and bodily degradation as a cute subscription service without ever addressing why so many bodies are failing.

I need incontinence management because my spine is full of lesions. What's everyone else's excuse? And why aren't we asking that question louder?