HANNAH SOYER
Road Map
“And in that tiny moment, I can see all of us—growing up across the planet, trying to
figure out the world around us with these bodies of ours that don’t quite fit… trying to
solve the impossible puzzle of independence, recklessly navigating our first experiences
with love and sex and friendship because we haven’t been given a goddamn roadmap.”
—Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Body
Here, then, a roadmap:
Find the people who can hold your own particular flavor of grief
Because they have drank from that well before.
Sometimes, you can recognize them in the way
Their beautifully crumpled bodies mirror yours.
Sometimes, you can’t.
Believe your Crip siblings when they tell you that you belong
Around this turn, down this path, through this door.
Learn to read the signs written by your body:
On being packed into a room of people
Standing above you—numbness, a cottony chill.
On realizing you can’t get into your town’s only gay bar
Because it is up a flight of stairs—exhaustion, dripping.
On heartbreak—a spiraling of nausea,
A wish to curl up in a body that does not curl.
When you come across these signs, it’s okay to follow them.
It’s okay to leave. Give yourself grace
On your journey—you’re carving out new worlds
For your people and you were robbed of instructions.
Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer born and living in the Midwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmopolitan, About Place Journal, Evocations Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, Mikrokosmos Journal, Brain Mill Press, Disability Visibility Project, Rooted in Rights, Sinister Wisdom, and Peach Mag. She is the founder of This Body is Worthy, a project aimed at celebrating bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals, and Words of Reclamation, a space for disabled writers.Hannah also happens to be a cat and chocolate enthusiast.
Art by Sofia Musa