Life in the Grey – a Column by Bailey Anne Vincent

Here’s what you need to know about disabled people. First, don’t call them “disabled people” unless they want to be called disabled people. Or people with disabilities. Or neither. I don’t call myself a disabled person, personally. It’s not because I don’t support the community or consider myself an…

“My second nephew was just born,” my boss texted me the other day. “If you have any parenting advice, I’ll pass it along.” I sat down to write him a couple of sentences regarding his brother’s first baby. Instead, I wrote this column. I became a mother unexpectedly as a…

This column is brought to you by anxiety. My anxiety isn’t very nice to me. She knows I need to write a column today, and that it’s the only day I can do it, but also that I have a mile-long to-do list I need to finish quickly. She knows…

My friend wrote a column about me and it goes like this: “Have you ever sat and actually stared at the sky, following a cloud, watching it transform and dissipate? Have you ever seen a flower wilt in decay? Have you ever felt so physically miserable that you actually had…

“I need to change my language.” I said this to my rehearsal director the other day after realizing I said the word “adaptive” again. “I hate the word adaptive,” I kept saying with increasing intensity. “It denotes that something is more and something is less.” In dance, we use the…

I am having surgery in a few weeks. Again. It will be my third surgery in roughly eight months’ time, though I don’t know why I’m counting. I dislike people who count these things. Are we bragging? Am I bragging? Sort of. I tend to say “I average about…

“How do you keep going?” This is a question I know all too well. I’m not sharing this question in the same way that my eldest daughter “complains” about her extra-long eyelashes. (Like, we get it. It’s so hard.) I’m sharing this because sometimes sharing is all we can do…

I hate the burden of feeling like a burden. I feel it all the time. I felt it last week when I went on a “bubble vacation” with two of my closest vaccinated friends. I felt it this week knowing I won’t be able to attend my cousin’s funeral.

“Meeting Corey at 2 to walk in the park,” my mom texted me at 8:14 a.m. “Want to come? I know you don’t feel well,” she said, rounding it off, “but didn’t want to exclude you.” And that was how my mom began and ended the most perfect text in…

I am a creature of habit. So much so that it’s easy to forget that other chronic illness patients deal with their conditions in completely different ways. (Wait, we don’t all watch “Love Island UK” and cry until we need Liquid I.V. in our tea?) But recently, I decided to…