How The Concept of Crip Time Can Change Media

I do not hide the fact that I’m disabled. My Twitter bio reads: “crippled and creative.” I am making a privileged choice in being so transparent. There are professional risks to being public about physical and mental health as a journalist. But a successful freelance career, for me, starts and ends with protecting my body and my mind. That means I work when I can. I often write and edit late into the night or early in the morning. I use an email signature that makes clear that my relationship to time is temperamental. I set my alarm when I want to, I guard my Google Calendar vigilantly, and I keep my medications (escitalopram and baclofen, if you’re curious) on my desk for when I inevitably forget. I manage my business according to the rhythms of my body, rather than the other way around. Navigating my workload requires asking questions of myself and of others when my body and brain aren’t cooperating. When I started writing this piece, I had the best of intentions. Now we’re months (and multiple health crises) down the line. But I filed the story in the end.

These are all ways that I practice crip time: a concept within the disability community that describes the way that some of us have a fundamentally different relationship to time than able-bodied people. As disability theorist Alison Kafer puts it, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” Practicing crip time requires vulnerability, self-awareness, and sacrifice—I will take 20 percent less work and money if it means 20 percent less pain—but it makes my life as a freelancer livable.