Rebekah Taussig, «Sitting Pretty. The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body»

A couple of years ago I attended a panel discussion featuring the voices of young women who’d already garnered notable success in their fields. There was a chef, a lawyer, someone in marketing, and a woman with a job I didn’t really understand. The moderator introduced the panel as a diverse group of women from different backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities.

The moderator took time to emphasize the importance of hearing different perspectives, and I was glad to see this sentiment backed by some amount of intentionality—the woman with the mysterious job and the moderator seemed to be the only white women with access to the microphone.

I listened to their stories about working in kitchens with bosses who hit on them and punished them when the flirtiness wasn’t reciprocated. Stories about waitressing long hours to make it through law school. Stories about rushing to drop kids off at daycare before speeding to work each morning. As the discussion unfolded, I recognized that this conversation wouldn’t intersect much with my own experience as a disabled woman. And that felt okay—this feeling happens, and not every conversation has to be for me.

But near the end of the discussion, a woman in the audience asked, “How do you manage work-life balance?” All of the women on the panel chuckled. No one wanted the microphone. Reluctantly one of them said, “I’m not really the best person to speak to this. I haven’t taken a day off in eleven years.” Everyone laughed and she passed the mic to another woman. Her response was similar. “Work kind of is my life,” she said, almost apologetically. “There are times that aren’t as busy, but it’s not uncommon for me to work a sixty-hour week.” A third woman was the first to offer a tip: “I find exercise is really important. Even if it means getting up at four in the morning to spend an hour at the gym before the rest of my family wakes up, it’s worth it.”

I sat in the audience, stunned that these were the only responses provided. Really? Is that it? Let’s all just giggle about the impossibility of having both a career and a body with limits? Nearly two years later, I still think about that conversation. Each woman on that panel presented themselves as living in bodies with endless resources, and they were there to model success from that position. How many women listening had bodies that could replicate that model? How many can sustain that approach for another ten years?

We live in a world that rewards women who can push themselves beyond their maximum capacity, but not a single woman alive can maintain that push indefinitely. What perspective might disabled women breathe into this conversation? What collaborative reimagination might ignite if we offer the microphone to people who’ve been navigating a relentless, unsustainable work setup with bodies that don’t/can’t/won’t/shouldn’t oblige—what do you think?