Crip Time Wheel

“Crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”¹ Ellen Samuels explores how crip time revolves around “a flexible approach to normative time frames,” and how there are many aspects, some more appealing than others, to the notion of crip time.² The author describes crip time in their perspective, to be understood as time travel, grief time, broken time, sick time, writing time, and vampire time.

For my creative contribution, I chose to make a ‘Crip Time Wheel’ to show the various ways the author describes crip time within their life. At the center of the wheel is “crip time” and each section within the wheel is an aspect of it. Each of these sections contains key words or phrases that stood out to me that Samuels used when explaining each particular notion. There are also images within each section to further illustrate an idea discussed in the reading, in order to help me remember the concept better.

Starting with time travel, this concept demonstrates the ability for Samuels to experience constraints of a different age than the one currently being lived.³ The key words used in the diagram are bodily narrative, health, wormhole, and unconscious privilege. I drew a car in this section to symbolize the “wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” that Samuels described when writing about the power of disability and illness⁴. There is also a clock within the same space to depict the framework of normative time. The reading states that “we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently – or not so silently – at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.”⁵

Grief time is described as “a time of loss, and the crushing undertow that accompanies loss.”⁶ Grief time is to the left of time travel on the wheel and the keywords from this concept include mourning, memory, non-linear flexibility, backwards, and forwards. I have drawn a broken heart in the grief time area to represent how Samuels has previously lost their mother and is dealing with this loss and mourning.⁷ The other image drawn in this area is a road with two paths, one branching off of the other. In this drawing, I attempted to capture the idea that “I wish for time to split and allow two paths for my life.”⁸

Broken time is next, and it discusses the forced breaks our bodies require, but also how different activities can physically break our bodies.⁹ It displays the keywords consisting of listening, language, physical state, limited, and separated. The author states that for crip time to be broken time, “it requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.”¹⁰ This notion can be captured in the drawing of a brain within this section. I have also drawn a body (or stick person) in order to encapsulate the ideas surrounding the physical state of body that Samuels describes and how their body moved in opposite directions from what “was supposed to fix me.”¹¹

On the other side of broken time, there is sick time. This notion is related to the actual time spent being sick and the required sick time needed at work. The key phrases within this category are alone, uneven ration, job insecurity, and work hard to earn sick time. There is a thermometer drawn for this aspect of crip time to depict sick time off of work and how the author “moved from being someone who kept getting sick, over and over, to someone who was sick, all the time.”¹² Additionally, the three arrows forming a circle in this category represent the continual process Samuels’ life consisted of. As described in the reading, this continuous process “consisted of going to campus and to the grocery store and then retuning home and doing schoolwork.”¹³

Writing time is the second last category of this wheel and it conveys how the author spends their time writing an essay. Its main words and phrases include story, credibility, physically invalid, and culturally valid. There is only one image drawn for this section, but it has two representations behind it. Firstly, the book represents how multiple people thought Samuels should write a book and that it would be considered the ultimate achievement even though Samuels would have been too sick to travel to promote the book.¹⁴ The second meaning behind the book is to represent the essay that Samuels has been working on for many years and the example that was used to illustrate how difficult writing a piece can be with a chronic illness.¹⁵

Lastly, vampire time is next to writing time, but also time travel because Samuels stated that ultimately time travel and vampire time go hand in hand.¹⁶ Vampire time can be considered “the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world.”¹⁷ The key words in this category are deception, out of sync, boundary, confines, and vampiric agelessness. I drew a ladder to illustrate how Samuels explains “I sometimes tire of not being taken seriously, of working my sick self into the ground to climb the tenure ladder while being perceived as a perpetual graduate student.”¹⁸ Finally, the coffin symbolizes the confinement that the body instills in within “the boundary between life and death.”¹⁹

Right side up view (1/2)

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Upside-down view (2/2)