I generally have four or five books open around the house--I live alone; I can do this--and they are not books on the same subject. They don't relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I'll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Like most of us who grew up online, I have many versions of “myself”.

As Tavi Gevinson pointed out in her essay for The Cut last year, we have merely entered the “relatable influencer” era “with trends like #nomakeup, #nofilter, #mentalhealth, #bodyimage, and ‘Instagram vs. Reality’ memes” dominating the grid today. Who knows what the algorithm gods will deign worthy this time next year?

The more glitzy (and more fleeting) elements of my life I choose to share aren’t faked or Photoshopped – they simply are not my life in its entirety. But since when has it been a prerequisite or even feasible to display all the complexities of the human experience in a grid, or in 280 characters? My Instagram feed serves as a literal and figurative snapshot of a much more complicated picture. Rather than implore everyone to repeatedly humanise themselves, I suggest a collective understanding amongst adults that we are all indeed human. That what we see online is only ever part of the story.

What does disability justice teach us today?

Don’t engage with disability justice and knowledge it as just an intellectual exercise without also engaging in the lived reality of it. That could be engaging with yourself around your own compulsory ableism — the way you don’t allow yourself to rest when you’re tired. That’s part of how ableism continues. Everybody is getting it reinforced inside themselves, so there’s this resentment: I did it, so you should do it too.

Ask yourself: How can I be an accomplice, how can I be in solidarity, how can I build interdependence with disabled communities? Think about how you can put disability justice into practice. Accessibility is not necessarily disability justice. Accessibility is bare bones — making what we already have accessible, rather than transforming what we have.

So much of the fear of “ugliness” is rooted in racism, gender binarism, and ableism. They’re afraid that if they look like us no one will desire them. But what I’ve learned is that oppressed peoples are able to build other forms of intimacy that are perhaps more robust. What does intimacy mean to you and how is it related to beauty?

Ugliness is a pathway to intimacy. You can’t have intimacy without trust, and you can’t have trust without vulnerability. In order to be vulnerable, you have to reveal parts of yourself that are dismissed as capital-U Ugly. There’s also this piece around disability — the interdependence of disability is inescapable. I feel like access is not a burden, it’s an amazing opportunity to be generative, to deepen community, relationships, everything.

When I think about intimacy and its connections to beauty, I feel like it’s more connected to ugliness than beauty. I think the only way that we can build intimacy is through ugliness. For example, there is something very magnificent about how disabled people build access to intimacy — that kind of intimacy that comes with not being afraid to state your access needs. Not beauty, but the magnificence or the learned experiences that ugliness teaches you on how to survive. People see this as an extremist thing, but what I’m saying is that it’s been a way in my life to not let go of people, and to live in that interdependence that doesn’t always feel revolutionary and good. Sometimes it fucking sucks — sometimes you just want to be able to take a walk by yourself. Sometimes it sucks to have to depend on someone to help you take a walk by yourself.

There are times when it’s incredibly hard. I’ve learned and we have all learned so many different pieces of how to survive, how to be and thrive within our lived experiences. The alternative is to pretend it away, but I also think there is something with disability that doesn’t allow you to turn away. You could try to pretend it away even though your reality is not such. But there’s a concreteness to me about disability that doesn’t allow you to pretend it away.

Shitty things happen. Ugliness is all around us all the time. Sometimes shit is not beautiful and that’s okay, that’s actually more generative, there is a depth to that. If I was able-bodied and I didn’t fall all the time, I would never know that experience and that depth. There have been so many amazing strangers who have helped me pick up all of my things from the sidewalk, from the floor, helped me get some ice. All of these pieces of everyday life are so connected to those moments of intimacy. There’s something in that.

I’ve noticed increasingly how political demands are moving away from resources and toward representation — how the goal is simply about following a diverse array of different bodies to learn from online. We aren’t critical of the idea of looking as knowing. I feel like people find it difficult to really encounter the complexity of other people beyond the look, because that requires us to encounter our own reflection and therefore our own complexity. Freakishness is a mirror: it’s other people’s projections.

It’s okay to have multiple strategies. As a transformative justice organizer, I’m mostly off the grid, but we need people working in the system. If more brown kids can see brown people be reflected in media, that’s great. If disabled kids can see disabled folks be actors and land movie roles, that’s a part of harm reduction. That’s not our ultimate goal obviously, but whether we like it or not, the media has tremendous impact on us.