It's Not the End of the World (2025)

In the aftermath of own developing chronic illness I found myself writing poems set in a fictional post-apocalypse. The more I learned about disability studies, the more fruitful this connection became.

During my research into post-apocalypse stories, I pinned down the antagonistic relationship the main characters experience in regards to their surroundings. I then projected these onto it my own experiences with disability. Both the characters in the post-apocalypse and I are living in a world that was not made for our bodies’ needs.

Reading about the post-apocalypse has also deepened my understanding of disability in a way I didn’t expect. In my thesis, I use the writing of Theresa Heffernan to dig deeper into the meaning of the term post-apocalypse. Her work acknowledges the fact that biblically speaking, post-apocalypse is an oxymoron. The apocalypse has historically and religiously been a revelation. At the very end of the bible, after plague and famine and war, God shows up and brings all believers into heaven. Time is not only linear, but we are following the march of progress into our inevitable happy ending.

The very existence of a post-apocalypse thus implies that this revelation has failed. God is dead. The world has not merely ended, we have lost the organizing principle of a belief in an ending. The genre sits within constant tension between what is and what is supposed to be here. Post-apocalypse is an aesthetics of ruins and of grief. So too does my disability serve as a constant reminder of what my body is supposed to be. There is no revelation in disability, or in becoming disabled, because I am still here. In my artistic practice I assert these feelings loud and clear. Disabled bodies are positioned as a radical intervention into our expectations and norms.

It is difficult to square modernism’s belief in inevitable progress, with the similarly inevitable decline of our own bodies. Our steady march towards wrinkles and creaky joints. Bad bones, gray and thinning hair. Mobility aids and full time care needs. So what are the implications of living in a body that does not and cannot rely on revelation as an organizing principle? I’m not just asking for me, I’m asking for you.

My research eventually lead me to make the publication It’s Not the End of the World. In three essays, which can be read in any order, the work unpacks how we may build a life worth living outside of our current meaning-making structures. The essays take the shape of a disability reading of several pieces of post-apocalyptic art. Both disability and the post-apocalypse can ask meaningful questions about who we are when the values we’ve built our societies around, like self-sufficiency, autonomy, and progress are taken away from us.