The Chronic Librarian

As a largely homebound person, my house isn't just a safe space for me, it is often the -- only -- space for me.

Don't be a dick when you visit a homebound person - take your dishes to the kitchen and don't make insensitive comments. We are literally trapped with our roommates and their guests.

One thing that able-bodied people don't realize about living with a homebound disabled person is that our physical space means something different.

It isn't that I don't want to share space, but I also don't have anywhere else to go if their guests are noisy or rude.

God, I get so tired of having to explain to people that if they want to be a wellness brand, they should just own that and proclaim the class rules they want. Instead, I just get told that I am too poor to be part of a community theoretically founded around accessibility tools.

One of my red flags for authors is them believing that black cats are a portent of evil.

I didn't expect to bump into this in a health memoir.

Can we please stop writing supposedly nuanced books on chronic illness that don't acknowledge capitalism and how it limits access to food and time for care?

- signed someone tired of white feminist takes on "Eastern" medicine

I just messaged someone to see if they want my list of citations for a conversation I had with them over lunch.

In typical goth spoonie fashion, it was about end of life planning and wills. This can be such a gift to family members, because they can have a plan in an already stressful time.

“Not Having the Energy to Even Live”: A Feminist Disability Perspective on Long COVID and Caregiving Long COVID is defined as the persistence of symptoms three or more months after infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19). A growing body of research docume....

“Not Having the Energy to Even Live”: A Feminist Disability Perspective on Long COVID and Caregiving - Smith - 2025 - Health & Social Care in the Community - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/...

Okay, bookkeeping seems like it could actually be fun? It seems a bit wild that someone could pay me to do that.

Of Monsters and Mainframes is seriously making my day. It is like reading a murder or cousin stuck in the Universal Monster universe.

Knowing When to Leave It has been a while since I have had the brain space to write - disability does that sometimes, but I said I was going to embrace the mess when I started...

New post on the newsletter: buttondown.com/TheChronicLi...

low and behold, 30 minutes later, I get an email saying that maybe they could sort of help with one of my accessibility concerns. Funny how that wasn't an option in our 1:1 emails.

"If you remember anything from my time here, please let it be that I had insights because of my disability, not that I wanted pity because of it. Everyone is only ever temporarily able-bodied, so how one treats disabled people is how one is asking to be treated down the line"

My little inner imp threw a somewhat poetic message in a group chat announcing my departure (due to inaccessibility) saying "

I need more people to read Isaac Fellman's "Notes From a Regicide" who want to discuss the tarot cards with me.

Reading sports romances can hit hard as a disabled person - they get the fear and the grief of not being able to do what you spent years training for.

If you could ask a librarian for help with anything, what would it be?

#librarian #informationmanagement

One of my pet peeves is people posting unlabeled graphs on substack notes to generate engagement through outrage. I just spent 20 minutes poking the report but can't share the critiques because the "discussion" is behind a paywall. What if I don't want to participate unless I know data is crunched.

One of the funny things about being a systems oriented person (aquarius stellium) is how doing basic things doesn't make any sense unless I understand the relationships between all the pieces. Ex: I need to understand the science behind each step of trying to make sourdough to be comfortable.

I love reorganizing stuff! Let me know if you need some virtual cheerleading or body doubling!

The weirdness of "librarian" being a helpful description of what you do, but also having been to library science school and knowing that libraries can function as extensions of the colonial state.

The hilarity of being a librarian by training and thus trying to find ways to cite my sources in a reliable format on social media. Now editing a spreadsheet to include at least some of my notes... Let's see how long this takes 😂