“The Puritans Have Harsh Values. They Can’t Play With Puppets On Sunday. They Can’t Dance In The

I Climbed the Gates of Heaven

A short poem written by me, loosely based off the concept from this piece of literature. 

                                  I Climbed the Gates of Heaven A white, soft light appears behind my eyelids. I open them slowly but the light gets no brighter. It is comforting and warm. The world comes into focus. Smiling people and joy. Reunions occur all around me. My grandparents are there, happy and young. They wrap me in a hug. But there is one face I don't see. I break from their embrace and call out. My voice is musical, beautiful. But it receives no reply. I run down the street, gold beneath my feet. But I don't take the time to admire it. There is a greater beauty in wait. My family calls after me, laughing. "What is the rush, my child?" But I don't turn back. When I reach it, it is huge, standing tall over everything. I cannot see the top from the ground. The pearl is cold to the touch but somehow still soft. Reaching out, I place my feet and pull myself up the bars. I hear them calling me. But I don't look back. I slip a couple times and almost fall. My muscles tired and aching. But I don't hesitate. When I at last reach the top, I swing my legs over and sit. The wails of the lonely reach my ears. The cries of the left behind. I climbed the gates of heaven. I descend slowly and the farther I go, the colder it gets. The bars become more solid, more unforgiving. I falter more often but I do not stop. At the bottom I am surrounded by thick fog. The air is stagnant yet harsh and I gasp loudly. But everything is muted here. I step around those howling by the entrance. Demanding admittance to where I have left. They have no eyes for me nor I for them. I call your name again but it is rough to my ears. I call louder, pushing my way into the fog. Like a whisper, I hear you call back. I am running now, falling often on the uneven ground. But I pick myself up, running faster. Pushed on by that whisper of you. The last time I fall I am caught by your arms. A white light emerges from where your hands touch mine. You are soft and warm. As I sigh out your name my voice is again musical. Your smile is radiant. The fog recedes in its wake. I climbed the gates of heaven. I climbed the gates of heaven, To be with you, Because you, Are all the heaven I need. 

so many tiny fluffs

my intent is not to be mean but I am sure it will come off that way anyways so I'm sorry for asking, but I am genuinely curious how you, a sighted person, reading braille is any different than a sighted person cosplaying as matt murdock.

wow, i, uh. i don’t really have an easy way to answer this question.

cosplaying matt murdock - or any other disabled character - if you’re nondisabled is taking on a set of experiences that’s associated with a tremendous amount of stigma and systemic oppression for the sake of a costume. it’s approaching the tools and aspects of lived experience and turning them into something fun for a day that can be taken off and cast aside when it gets inconvenient.

 it’s an action that’s totally ignorant of the impact of media, the social and historical contexts of spectatorship and disability, the lack of prominent disabled characters as representation, and the real life accusations of ‘faking disability’ that disabled people face every day (and which severely impact availability of needed resources). it’s disrespectful and harmful. 

so. that’s cosplay. 

now, i’m working in a broad sense to become more knowledgeable about accessibility, alternative formats, and the representation and misrepresentation of disability so that i can explore these things in more formal academic contexts and hopefully work towards more relevant and valuable change. i’m probably going to graduate with a focus in disability studies. 

as far as braille comes in, i’m in the process of writing a 100+ page research paper on the representation of disability in daredevil. i’ve read about 200 daredevil comics, but i realized pretty early on that my paper would be absolutely valueless if my only point of attention was the comics themselves, so i did a lot of really varied reading and study. i am sighted, and the experiences matt murdock has as a blind person aren’t in any way something i would ever feel like i could just like, assume to be able to talk about. they’ll never be something i’ll be fully aware of, ever, but i think research remains important, because a paper like the one i’m writing doesn’t exist in the world and i think it’s valuable. 

i’m working on learning braille because of its inclusion/lack of inclusion in the daredevil comics and its subsequent connection to my research topic, but also because a major part of what i’m working on is making a piece of media that centers so fully on a blind character accessible to blind/visually impaired people. because i think structures of accountability are really really key to representational work, and right now that’s basically impossible. braille is one aspect of a potential ‘accessibility kit’ that i’m working on for comics. 

primarily, though, i’m learning braille because my attention to disability, representation of disability, accessibility, etc. extends well beyond this specific piece of media in a way that’s very distinct from the lack of awareness in cosplaying this character. i think it’s important to effectively address situations of inaccessibility and ableism, and doing so requires being knowledgeable and aware. i don’t know if things are improperly or incompletely labeled if i can’t read those labels. i don’t know how things should be formatted correctly, i don’t know if something’s a valid alternative format, i don’t have a method available to try to help make things suck less. like, many many many of the buildings at my college are incompletely brailled. so i’m working with the office of disability services and independently to try to approach that issue. 

a lot of people accessorize basic braille. in those contexts, braille is stripped of its significance. it’s reduced to a fun thing for sighted people to play with and throw aside. the same thing is true of ASL. those uses of braille and ASL are absolutely in the same sort of vein as cosplaying a disabled character, because they’re disrespectful and unaware. but i don’t think that learning braille and ASL are inherently damaging or thoughtless. learning braille allows me to become a resource for translation and a prompt towards accountability. 

ultimately it comes down to this: i’m working really hard to be aware of my positionality and how easy it is to accessorize experiences of disability. of course i fuck up, and i really encourage you to call me out if you see that happen. but for me, learning braille isn’t like. collecting action figures and t-shirts and reading as many comics as possible. it isn’t about the character. it’s about developing more tools to approach accessibility, accountability, representation, awareness. 

‘average writer kills off 3 gay characters per book’ factoid actualy just statistical error. queerbaiting rowling, who kills off over 10,000 characters per series and announces they are all gay after their deaths, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

tfw your deadlines on Tuesday and digital print says there’s a ‘couple days wait’ but they’re closed all weekend and ya gotta bind all 36 pages n cover em before the deadline someone send me food n patience

[two selfies of auden, short blue hair pushed back with a white and purple flower crown. they wear a dark purple shirt, large-framed glasses, and magenta lipstick with glitter. they smile, revealing a single dimple.] 

there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell -walt whitman

hey reblog my selfies, tell me i’m cute

relatedly: i’m honestly kind of disgusted that the daredevil fandom is so horrifically unwilling to put in image descriptions on photos/gifs/videos

like, this is always something that you should be doing and something you should be aware of, but if you’re actively engaging with a piece of media that has a blind protagonist, you seriously need to put in some effort to make your content about that blind protagonist accessible to actual blind/vi folks 

otherwise you need to think damn hard about who the intended audience of that media is and what that says about the structures of accountability it (doesn’t) have in place, what the implications of that are for representation, and how that ties into the call for “nothing about us without us.” and then, as matt murdock says to people he catches doing crime, change your life.

Thank fucking god! After three continuous days of doing nothing else, I have finally triumphed! I can have my life back!