Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creatorof the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig,processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuancedportrait of a body that looks and moves differently thanmost.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), orangelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she gotolder, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to becomplex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful andfulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to livein a body that doesn't fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from thecomplications of kindness and charity, living both independentlyand dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasivenessof ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everydaylife.Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at onepoint or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyricalessays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and morevoices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Prettychallenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practicaland imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write anentirely different story.