Abstract
In this creative nonfiction essay, the author reflects on how 'crip time' has operated in their life, not only as a form of liberation, but also as a site of loss and alienation.
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. Now in my forties, as I reflect on my life, these other ways of looking at crip time have been pressing deeply, leaving their mark.
