Navigating crip time
Hello,
There’s nothing like disability to make you aware of the passage of time.
For me, and lots of disabled people, time and age are tricky concepts.
On the one hand, I often joke that I feel about 100 years old. Unlike a lot of thirty-somethings, I am intimately acquainted with pain, care, and the fallibility of the human body (lucky me). I am also deeply jaded about the world and have been since I was - oh, I don’t know - seven years old. People used to describe me as an ‘old soul’, which I used to take as a compliment and now see as a way of them making themselves feel better about all the things I had to learn way too young (looking at you, secondary school teachers). These days, I pace my energy in the way I imagine most people start doing in their late 70s, which does quite understandably make it feel like I have less time than everyone else. CP, by the way, also quite literally ages you quicker, because of all the additional strain on joints and muscles and, let’s not forget, the brain (there is also some really fun evidence that it is linked to early menopause - again, the luck doesn’t stop round here). All of this adds up to a rather panic-inducing sense that, at 31, I am running out of time to do all the things I want to do - write more books, have a family, see the world - before I inevitably collapse in a crumpled heap. And people wonder why I have no chill.
On the other hand, disability keeps me intimately connected to childhood and adolescence. I can’t brush my own teeth, for crying out loud. A lot of the help I need comes from people my own age, thank god, but a lot of it still comes from my parents. It’s hard to feel grown up while asking your dad to take you for a wee, you know? My choices are also curtailed in a way most commonly associated with being a teenager - most notably, where I can live is dictated by the limits of my support network (foiling my best mate’s quest to get me to move to Manchester). But the physical realities that keep me tied to childhood are nothing compared to the social constraints that do so even more. It’s difficult to feel like an adult when random strangers insist on treating you like a child, or when inaccessible systems leave you always asking for permission (“please can I get on the train for which I have paid for a ticket?” is not a question that fosters feelings of autonomy). It’s really difficult to feel like an adult when you are locked out of many of the things that society uses as milestones to measure how successfully you have grown up - first relationships, second relationships, buying a house with someone, getting promoted, getting married, becoming someone who provides care rather than receiving it. None of these things have ever happened for me, and they may or may not happen in the future, and this lack of milestones leaves me feeling perpetually left out and left behind (thank god I published a book).
My friends like to joke that I don’t do anything until I do it all at once, or that I do everything in the ‘wrong’ order (I owned a flat long before I’d ever been on a date). And sure, this can be darkly amusing, and I’m the first one to laugh at myself. But this reality we choose to find funny isn’t some personality quirk of mine (or, it isn’t entirely) - it arises from the deep structural inequalities that shape my life, and the ways I have managed or not managed to navigate them. While all of this can be genuinely funny, I would say it is not, well, fun. I often just feel like I’m failing.
This is where the concept of crip time comes in. Coined by Alison Kafer and expanded on by Ellen Samuels, crip time describes the ways disabled bodies and minds resist the nondisabled timeline, whether because it takes us much longer to get ready in the morning or because we mess with the expectations of those pesky normative milestones. Samuels writes in her incredible essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time:
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.
She goes on to describe the essential role that grief plays in crip time, but then she says this:
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.
We see the word broken, I think, as pejorative - a breaking down - but it’s not here. For Samuels, breaking time is an opening up, a new beginning, a breaking free.
After all, she says:
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.
Beautiful and forgiving.
I love the notion of crip time for several reasons, not least of which is that it names a fundamental experience that I used to worry was ‘just me’. It shows me that the complicated relationships I have with time and age are complicated for a lot of other people, too, which is quite reassuring.
And it’s also reassuring to know that my left-behind-ness isn’t my fault. It’s structural. Because nondisabled time (crip-less time?) is just another way to exclude disabled people, to write narratives not made for us and then blame us when we do not neatly fit into the lines. And if that’s true, maybe in all those moments that feel like failure, we can offer ourselves forgiveness instead.
Crip time also asks questions. Do we need to follow nondisabled timelines? Are they really better? If so, says who? If not, can we replace them with other, better, less binding things? Can we do away with the need for timelines entirely? What could we build in their place? What does breaking free of all this look like, exactly? That’s where the beauty comes in, I think - in the permission crip time gives us to live differently, in ways that suit or bodies and minds.
Knowing about crip time doesn’t mean that my present reality in which I am both older and younger than my years is any less emotionally fraught or hard to deal with. But it goes someway to soften the blow, and reminds me that - much as I would ideally like a wife (who wouldn’t?) - I am not obliged to be sad about the ways I haven’t lived up to society’s expectations. And it reminds me that maybe it’s ok to have an elderly woman’s hip pain and need my dad to walk me like a toddler. Maybe it’s ok to feel six and 16 and 60. We’re all navigating time in our own way.
And next time I’m late to meet you, just remember: I’m on crip time, baby.
With love,
Luce