Disability Pride Month: The Stories I Can’t Explain — Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents

Here’s how disability pride works. I’ve been home now for over four months. That’s a significant accomplishment, one many people doubted I could manage. I think a lot of people expected me to just roll over and give up, to build something new instead of returning to claim my life of 20 years.

But this is my home.

Written in these walls are the stories that I can’t explain
I leave my heart open
But it stays right here empty for days
She told me in the morning
She don’t feel the same about us in her bones
It seems to me that when I die
These words will be written on my stone

The line about not feeling “the same about us in her bones” just hits my heart. It is the way so many of us experience abandonement that’s not intentionally cruel or ugly, just two sets of expectations that don’t line up.

The challenge is that the repeated abandonment of neglectful and traumatic childhoods messes up our capacity to cope with abandonment. My therapist and I talk about this quite a bit, my overwhelming pile of moments and hours and months where I was abandoned by people I thought loved…