Rising and Gliding
A Substack at the intersection of Disability and Culture
Image logo: white text on maroon background says rising and gliding. A sub stack at the intersection of disability and culture.
What is Rising and Gliding?
Rising and Gliding fills the “disability gap” that pervades media and cultural commentary in the United States. People with lived experience of disability or impairment have historically been left out of the media landscape. Television, movies, literature, and news stories that include disabled characters are often written and produced by not-currently-disabled people. Rising and Gliding is a space is for cultural commentary from a disability studies perspective.
Why Should I Care?
We live in a world where success is defined by personal progress and growth. As Kate Bowler says, "a world that loves us better when we are good, better, best." The truth is: disability can happen to anyone at any time. Living through a disabling event or growing up with a disability does not make one heroic: it makes us human. And for BIPOC and members of LGBTQ+, communities, a disability will only compound the difficulty of living in a white supremacist, patriarchal society. Reading about the world from the perspective of disabled writers helps pull back the curtain of able-bodied privilege.
Who is Erin Ryan Heyneman?
Greetings, friends. I'm Erin Ryan Heyneman (she/her). I left my career as an educator when, at 35 years old, I became disabled by a catastrophic Multiple Sclerosis Flare that left an apple watch face-sized a hole my brain. Acquiring a motor and cognitive disability shifted just about everything in my life: my priorities, my role as a mom, my relationships; even the clothes I wear and the food I eat changed dramatically. I write about what it's like to be a disabled cis white woman in the United States, where everything from city planning to media, news, and pop culture, and art have not yet moved beyond “the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) fixed everything.” The ADA did not change everything. It has become a law so easy to circumvent that it is enforced largely by lawsuits from people with disabilities who have been harmed. More content like this is in store!
What’s With the Title?
I chose Rising and Gliding as the title for this project because I have always loved a particular line from Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." In the poem, the speaker attends a public lecture on astronomy to hear of the "facts and figures," of the universe. By the second stanza, they are bored by stuffy academia. Whitman writes,
"How soon unaccountable I became tired and sickTill rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,"
When we analyzed this poem in my English class, I'd ask my students how a person might "glide" and we'd have fun trying to reenact an easy, laid back stroll. Back then, I never thought about how a wheelchair or rollator glides. Or "how soon unaccountable," (out of nowhere) I might find myself tired and sick from the effects of Multiple Sclerosis. Or how, after my disabling event, I would become lonely and "by myself" a good amount of the time. Still, I find the internal rhyme of the "i" and "ing" sounds to be gentle and surprising to the reader.
I try to imagine myself rising and gliding in a life that is not at all like what I'd planned. Like the lines, I hope to be gentle and open to the surprises of what comes next.