I need a little change of pace in the middle of this shop update and heading into the holiday season, so for my birthday and as we move into cooler weather, I'm going to do something different for this newsletter.

On my website, I talk about slow commerce and briefly mention crip time (crip being a reclaimed term by disabled people, not to be used about disabled people by nondisabled people). The concept of crip time is both something I wrestle with and an anchor for me. I guess the only reason I wrestle with it is because I have to live and interact in a larger capitalistic world that doesn't honor it or even acknowledge its existence (but at least I also now live in a place that runs on indigenous, Caribbean, island time, much more my speed).

But as an anchor, it reminds me that my rhythm, my needs, my body, my brain, my creativity are valid as they are, and are without choice. And if crip time is new to you, maybe you'll relate to the concept and honor that for yourself.

I tend to revisit the iconic Ellen Samuels' 2017 essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time when I need to be reminded that the struggle and the anchor are real. So, enjoy some of my favorite excerpts from it 🖤

When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we're late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a "flexible approach to normative time frames" like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. My friend Alison Kafer says that "rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own "normal."

And yet recently I have found myself thinking about the less appealing aspects of crip time, that are harder to see as liberatory, more challenging to find a way to celebrate...

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time...

For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words...

Like the leaves just now turning as the year spins toward its end, I want sometimes to be part of nature, to live within its time. But I don't. My life has turned another way.

I live in crip time, now.

Please share my work with your people!

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