We were petulant and impatient, claiming to experience outsized agony, when expected to endure less romantic realities.

Just as falsehoods threatened truth, disorder threatened beauty.

My main access to the esteem of my peers—who were, with few exceptions, mostly young, white, able-bodied men with family money—was in how little I had despite how hard I worked. This, plus my disability, plus motherhood, bathed me in a tragic light, which, if I stepped into it just right, lit me up with the look of moral superiority. I could wield

People make spaces I cannot enter, teaching me how forgotten I am, how excluded I am from “real life.”

They saw absence, lack. But I, having only ever been in my body, did not feel lacking. Going up the stairs feels like going up the stairs. Walking feels like walking. It looks strange, I guess, to those who watch me. It looks lesser. But I had no reason to feel lesser. That would require lessons, for which I had many willing teachers.

I meet reality by trying to either transcend it or sit below its surface. I want the fix, but not the work. I want the world, but not its facts. I do not know how to reconcile opposing desires, to hold them in my mind at the same time. The attempt brings only weakness and I feel myself succumbing to the dismissal of the dissonant mind.

Not being of the world was precisely what made me better, wiser, a philosopher, my soul gold and the others’ iron. These theories contained in them a superiority, and once I embraced it, it kept me aloft, saved me from further descent. Judgment became a powerful antidote to despair. I thought: If I must exist at a distance, let it be from above.

As kids, we’d both been compelled to derail experiences we felt excluded from. We’d believed and placed all our self-worth on the notion that to assert yourself against the crowd was a form of higher-level thinking, which sometimes it was and sometimes it was cowardice.

home. I imagine myself already there, leaning to kiss the forehead of my sleeping son, collapsing in my own bed, drawing my hand across my husband’s shoulders. But habit and exhaustion limit me.