“There is room for bodies like mine to be gazed at for reasons other than difference”
Natalie E. Illum writes about her relationship to her body and her spastic cerebral palsy:
I didn’t really think in terms like beautiful/ugly or shame/confidence. I knew that my disability was permanent and that I was a financial and physical burden to my family. Those were the facts. I was sometimes told I looked nice, but I didn’t expect to hear words like beautiful or stunning associated with any part of my body. Ever. Those words were for able-bodied people.
She talks about being asked to participate in a beauty positivity project and thinking back to a poem she’d once written, with the lines: “Disability isn’t pretty./ It’s permanent captivity./ It’s your brain held hostage/ by your own nervous system.”
In many ways, this poem still holds truth for me. But the body, the body can still be beautiful. There is room for bodies like mine to be gazed at for reasons other than difference. […] I knew I was searching for a reason to stay in my body — a way not to give up on it.