Exploring Alternative Communication and Crip Time
Or: How Taking or Giving Time Can Benefit Us All
Image Description: A silver, slightly antiqued stop watch with dial and watch hands stopped in their motion.
One of the disabled writers I follow and read avidly is Alice Wong. Her latest Teen Vogue column is a fantastic exploration of “crip time” through a recent change in how she communicates after she became nonspeaking following a sudden health crisis. It’s a shift for her on many levels, including identity, expression, and many aspects of communication and how she spends her time.
Augmentative and Alternative Communication
“Augmentative and Alternative Communication: How Becoming a User Changed My Relationships” explores Wong’s adoption of technology that helps her communicate using her phone through a text-to-speech app, and that she is learning about and growing into better awareness of the AAC community (people with disabilities experiencing challenges communicating orally — sometimes referred to as nonspeaking — who use devices to help with communication).
Wong also explains how this change has altered her identity and how she presents herself to the world. She continues to learn about AAC and adapt, but also misses the sound of her voice and other noises she could previously make (such as laughing) that are no longer possible for her.
Additionally, the nature of Wong’s conversations has changed. They are slower because of how it takes time to type her responses. Sometimes the flow of discussion has moved on or feels extended due to the time it takes. She notes missing the way words used to come so quickly and finds herself saying less or skipping pieces of conversation due to feeling pressed for time, which can feel like cutting herself short.
While Wong has a strong disability identity, she still has to contend with ableism and assumptions about her use of AAC. For example, will people give her the necessary time and assistance to communicate? During a medical emergency she was without her device and personal aide, so was unable to communicate with the medical team. Wong experienced pain and poor treatment because of this denial of communication tools.
Cripping Time and the World
Wong highlights the essay "Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time" by Dr. Ellen Samuels and how living with a disability requires changing how you spend time, how you listen to your body, and how you attend to the requirements of your disability.
Wong extends this concept further by writing about how she and other disabled people are also changing the wider world, and not only their particular place in it:
“To crip something is to bend, compress, twist, subvert, and imbue disabled wisdom into systems, institutions, and cultures. As I’ve done before as a physically disabled person, I will now crip the world mightily with the multiple perspectives I have as a disabled, nonspeaking, ventilator-dependent, high-risk Asian American woman. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and physical labor to crip the world. ”
She reshapes the world by necessity through multiple identities that cannot be altered. Wong lives within the boundaries of her body, disability, abilities, and so forth. If people want to communicate with her, they need to give her time to use her AAC device. If she goes out in the world, it must accommodate her wheelchair. On many levels, the world must adjust to her essential being in order for it to be equal, just, and inclusive.
Reshaping Culture
Wong is not just writing about accessibility of the physical world. She is explaining that attitudes and culture must change for true inclusion of disabled people:
“Ableism is baked into our society, and AAC users face many challenges in public life. But we belong in public, holding court in conversations, doing our thing, having our access needs respected, and being our full selves unapologetically. I am a baby AAC user and am still evolving, discovering new aspects of life without speech. AAC users can collectively bend conventional modes of communication, practice crip time, teach speaking people to slow down, and have us centered for once instead of at the margins. That’s my dream so that other newbies don’t have to experience what I did.”
She aims for crip time to be better understood and embraced — for there to be a greater understanding and patience for the needs of disabled people. Perhaps disabled people will always have to live in the crip time zone, but what if nondisabled people understood the time demands on people with disabilities and worked to support and ease them?
For example, what if my time were better respected? What if I didn’t have to wait extra long for assistance or for medical appointments just because of my disability? What if I didn’t need to make all those calls and write all those appeals for health insurance coverage because my needs were met without fighting for them? What if I didn’t have to spend time advocating for ramps and accessibility because other people made sure these changes were made (when they know they are required and necessary)? What if we didn’t rush a nonspeaking AAC user in communicating and let them take the time they need to convey their messages?
Just to bolster the case of providing more time for AAC users, we know the benefits of giving time can literally be astronomical. Consider the example of brilliant Dr. Stephen Hawking, who happened to also be an AAC user and explored the fundamentals of the universe from his wheelchair. I think we all are better for giving him time to communicate and giving us his time to explain the incredible physics he discovered.
In any case, because the time of disabled people is often not respected — we continue to live in crip time and must bend the world by force to accommodate our basic needs. A culture that ignores the requirements of accommodating disabled people will continue to fail, eventually, all people.
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Thank you for this, Kelly. xo