Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

A
memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account
@sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a
beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than
most.

Growing
up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw
disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame),
inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt
right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed
disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and
fulfilling.

Writing
about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t
fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and
charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and
how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to
everyday life.

Disability
affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By
exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the
need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity.
Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical
and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely
different story.

REBEKAH TAUSSIG, PH.D. is a Kansas City writer and teacher with her doctorate in Creative Nonfiction and Disability Studies. She has led workshops and presentations at the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, and Davidson College on disability representation, identity, and community. She also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty where she crafts “mini-memoirs” to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. She lives with two cranky orange cats and one angsty-tender human.