In this You Are Here commission, Lisa Davies takes us for a tense walk through the past, exploring the things we remember and the things we wish we could forget.
You Are Here – peer to peer survivor writing – was Jet Moon’s second survivor writer’s platform; building on the first: Playing With Fire, which took place in 2021. You Are Here offers an expanded series of workshops, a survivor writer’s group, via Spread The Word, and a series of interviews for the Wellcome Collection archives.
Content Warnings for A Wednesday: Experience of oppression, stress and anxiety.
Content Warnings for Orgasm: Satire with a comic sexual subtext.
Content Warnings for Reticence: Silencing, Grief, Loss, Pathology.
Content Warnings for F****** Hill(s): Discussion of Exclusion, Inaccessibility, Spatial Apartheid, Profanity.
Listen along as you read
A Wednesday (C) Lisa Davies 2024
A Wednesday
I can’t take that it’s not on a pallet.
You have to take that. I’ve paid £80 for you to take that.
It didn’t arrive on a pallet. I don’t have a pallet. I can’t put it on pallet.
I need you to take this powerchair back to Ripley.
I cannot drive.
I cannot drive a powerchair to Derby.
I need to get a refund.
Now. Stood here. On my doorstep.
Having driven to an incorrect address.
Is not the time to be awkward.
He takes it, eventually.
But only after my aunty, present at the time, and a woman from the mobility shop, via my phone, intervene and advocate for its collection.
My personhood undermined, again.
I spend the rest of the day in frustration.
Trying to reduce my own anxiety.
Insomnia.
Orgasm (C) Lisa Davies 2024
I have waited almost two months for this moment.
You burst in through my front door not even stopping to tell me your name(s).
Spend the first few minutes debating out loud whether you have the correct screwdriver for the job. My heart sinks.
You leave the room to fetch the ‘other’ toolbox.
Success. You have the right shaped tool.
And with that,
you peel back my covering, pull out my wires, remove me from my inlet, replace me with another of identical visage and form.
Next, you reattach my wires, replace my covering, reinsert your tool and tighten me up.
Then you place a sticker on me to indicate I have been tampered with.
At the key moment, you turn me on. Pressing all my buttons one by one. Fiddling with my joystick. Click. Click. Click.
I emit a steady, satisfied whirring noise, and burst into motion.
To be energised again after all that time spent against the wall, static, is a release.
Reticence (C) Lisa Davies 2024
There’s a lot that I want to say, but when I try to speak honestly and openly about what I think or how it is for me, you hold up your hand and tell me to stop.
Or you say, “you’re being too negative”
When I try to talk about death, loss, or grief, you say I’ve been traumatised and represent both myself and my experiences as pathology.
I mean, yes, I have been on earth a fair while, and yes, some of my life has been traumatic, but I don’t see why my discussion of death, grief, or loss is less valid than yours, or why mine is subject to diagnoses, and yours is straightforwardly regarded as common an aspect of adulthood as getting a badge for swimming is when you are a child.
And when I do have the energy and find the courage to speak about anything, really, somehow my words are never the correct ones.
I could wrap them in metaphor, soften the meaning with imagery of well worn, overdone treads of love, but to do so risks straying too far from the compass of my meaning.
To speak is to be deliberately misinterpreted, my own words are a cravat used to strangle me.
When I speak, the words I utter are not regarded as knowledge because I neglected to bring with me a seventy-five-page dossier of support,
of course, so did everyone else, but I am quickly dismissed.
So, you will have to excuse me if I am not the first to open my mouth,
if I pause to think before speaking, or my responses aren’t quick or concise enough for you, or fail to match your expectations.
I am probably weighing up the many permutations. Debating the time, to energy, to desired outcome ratio.
I have been muted too many times.
Of course, none of this matters when you’re buying a loaf, does it?
F****** Hill(s) (C) Lisa Davies 2024
Mylie said it was the climb, but the adverts for lightweight powerchairs commonly depict the users’ wheeling on beautifully flat terrain with no friction,
and well-trimmed lawns, or in environments were drop kerbs and tactile pavements are abundant, and every door encountered is automatic, and parts like the Red Sea.
Were the occupants grin like emoticons and pain is a myth.
Where the weather is permanently sunny, and rain is a work of fiction only imaginable in a nightmare.
Where any degree of gradient has been air brushed from the pavement like dog excrement or those of no fixed abode.
Where the hills are not so much alive with The Sound of Music, as they are taboo, forbidden, invisible.
Powerchair users need powerchairs that can function in environments they actually encounter, spaces with hills, cracked and broken pavement slabs, no drop kerbs, holes in the road, spaces were equal access is an afterthought because that’s how the world is.
About the author
I am a powerchair user with Cerebral Palsy. I identify as disabled with a preference for social model understandings of disability. I write from and about my lived experience, I write about the everyday, the mundane, and my identity as a disabled person commonly influences the content, form and direction of my writing. I joined the Survivor Writers’ Group on the basis of my experience of discrimination and disablism. I aimed to support others, and was looking to connect with people who better understood my work. I enjoy writing comic poetry and like to feature humour in my writing. I have returned to writing poetry having completed an autoethnographic doctorate in December 2022, entitled: An Autoethnographic Study of Disablism in England 2015 to 2018. I am currently writing my own poetry collection using my lived experience as a creative catalyst for my work. I have previously had work published in Nerve magazine and The Great British Write Off.