Reflections By Apoorva

The course led me somewhere I had not expected: disability poetry.

I had enrolled anticipating critical theory and argumentative writing. Those elements were certainly present, yet somewhere midway through the course I found myself drawn away from theory alone and toward lived articulation.
That shift led me to a writer who compiled an anthology of disability poetics and described it as a “mixtape.” The writer reflects on spending years without recognising herself as disabled despite living with chronic illness, medical intervention, and physical limitation. She had experienced disability long before she possessed a word through which she could understand herself. That reflection altered the way I thought about disability altogether. Before this course, I had understood disability primarily through visible barriers and questions of accessibility.I was now questioning the isolation of living within experiences that remain unnamed or socially unintelligible. There are people moving through pain, exhaustion, or instability without ever being given the language that allows those realities to become recognisable, even to themselves. 

The poetry also changed the way the body itself could be understood. One poem described fatigue not as ordinary tiredness, but as something constant and consuming, something that quietly reshapes daily life around endurance, recovery, and limitation. It drew attention to how differently rest is experienced and understood. For some people, slowing down does not require explanation; for others, exhaustion must constantly be justified in order to be believed. The poem revealed how deeply ideas of productivity and normalcy shape the way certain bodies are valued, while others are questioned for needing care, pause, or accommodation.

Another piece that remained with me centred on the fear of becoming unworthy of love through illness. The poem did not dramatise the question, which somehow made it more affecting. Beneath it was an awareness of how illness can alter the way people are perceived — not only socially, but intimately. The poem revealed how easily disabled and chronically ill bodies are distanced from ideas of desirability, reciprocity, and emotional fullness. What emerged was not simply loneliness, but the exhaustion of living within cultural narratives that so often associate worthiness with health, independence, and bodily stability.

The course also drew attention to the able-bodied gaze and the way disability is so often interpreted through assumption, pity, or distance rather than genuine attention. The poetry resisted that gaze entirely. It did not ask to be translated into something comfortable or inspirational. Instead, it insisted on disability as lived experience: complex, ordinary and deeply human. More than anything, I challenged the impulse to immediately categorise or explain disability, and replaced it with the responsibility to listen more carefully to the realities disabled people have already been articulating for themselves.

This reflection is not an attempt to speak over experiences that are not mine. What has changed, however, is the way I think about disability itself. I no longer see it solely through the framework of limitation or accommodation. I now understand it as a way of inhabiting the world that shapes one’s relationship to time, labour, intimacy, language, care, and selfhood. The poetry did not offer me conclusions so much as a different mode of attention, and I think that shift will stay with me long after the course ends.