You feel it building, simmering beneath your skin like a storm gathering in the distance, dark clouds heavy with the weight of everything you’ve endured. You are the thunder in the distance, the crackle of lightning that splits the sky. Your body, this body that you once called home, now feels like a battlefield. You live inside it, but you no longer have control. Every joint, every nerve, every cell rebels, not with the grace of a revolution but with the cruelty of a slow, unyielding siege.
They say rage is unproductive, but they’ve never been trapped inside a body that betrays them. They’ve never fought to get basic care, clawing through layers of red tape, begging for relief that never seems to come. They don’t know what it is to scream silently in sterile rooms, your voice swallowed by the suffocating indifference of the system. You sit under harsh fluorescent lights, recounting your symptoms to another blank face, another doctor who listens but doesn’t hear. "It’s in your head," they tell you. "You’re too young to be this sick."
Gaslit into doubting your own pain, you leave those rooms with a smoldering fury that you carry like a second skin. It clings to you, a mantle you never wanted to wear. You want to set it down, but it’s fused to you now, a permanent reminder of every time your reality was dismissed, your suffering waved away like an inconvenience.
The rage is not just yours, though. It belongs to every disabled person denied the right to live fully in this world. Every curb too high, every door too narrow, every public space designed without a thought for those who navigate life differently than the rest. The world is a labyrinth, designed to exclude you, to make you feel like you’re asking for too much when all you want is the basic dignity of accessibility.
You are told to be patient. Be gracious. Be inspiring, even, as though your suffering is a gift for others to learn from. As though your exhaustion, your pain, your very life is meant to be a lesson in perseverance for the able-bodied. But why should you have to teach this lesson when your body is already an education in endurance?
There’s rage in that too—rage at being made into a spectacle, at being reduced to an object of pity or admiration, rather than seen as a whole person. Rage at the endless bureaucracy, the phone calls to insurance companies that stretch into hours, the denials that come with no explanation. Rage at the ticking clock of your body’s limitations, knowing that time is not on your side, and yet still being forced to wait for the care that could sustain you.
Your rage is a fire, yes, but it’s not a wildfire meant to destroy. It’s the hearth that keeps you alive, the flame that burns bright when everything else is dark. It is the only constant in a world that denies you consistency, a world that starves you of safety, of care, of connection.
And yet, rage does not save you from the loneliness. The isolation that comes when you can’t leave the house for days, when your friends stop calling because you’re never well enough to join them. You live in the gap between their world and yours, a no-man’s-land where the silence is so thick you could scream and still not hear your own voice. Depression creeps in like a slow, cold fog, wrapping itself around your mind until you can’t see past it. The deprivation isn’t just physical—it’s the absence of life outside your body, the missed opportunities, the stolen experiences. Your world narrows to the size of a room, a bed, a wheelchair, and that shrinking feels like suffocation.
You work twice as hard for half as much, and the unfairness of it all gnaws at you. You see people breeze through life, unaware of the invisible hurdles you leap just to stay alive. They take for granted what you would give anything to have: a body that moves freely, a mind that is not consumed by survival. They don’t understand that your life is a negotiation with time, with energy, with pain, every day a calculation of what you can afford to give.
But still, that fire—the rage that courses through your veins, the heat that keeps you moving—burns. It will not be extinguished. It is your strength, your refusal to disappear quietly. It fuels your will to fight, even when the battle feels endless. You are not fragile; you are molten, reshaping yourself every day in the furnace of your fury.
The world tries to tell you that rage is dangerous, that it will consume you from the inside out. But you know better. Rage, for you, is survival. Rage is what keeps you alive in a world that would rather you fade away. You are not here to inspire. You are here to exist, to take up space, to demand what is rightfully yours. And that, above all else, is the power of your rage—it is your reminder that you are still here. You are still fighting. You are still alive.
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