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About | Ballastexistenz

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My name is Mel Baggs — you might know me as Amanda, but I’ve started going by my middle name again. I am a disabled writer and artist.  I am cognitively disabled, physically disabled, chronically ill, developmentally disabled, and psychiatrically disabled, so I have experience with a lot of different disability communities.  I often feel like an outsider in all of them, but the one I feel most at home in is the developmental disability self-advocacy community.  This is because it’s not a community based on a diagnosis, but a community based on a history of shared experiences, and I have lived in the developmental disability service system for pretty much my entire adult lifetime.  I was born in 1980, so I am 33 years old at the time of writing this. Ballastexistenz is a historical term that means ‘ballast existence’ or ‘ballast life’, that was applied to disabled people in order to make us seem like useless eaters, lives unworthy of life.  I knew when I started this blog that this was

My name is Mel Baggs — you might know me as Amanda, but I’ve started going by my middle name again. I am a disabled writer and artist. I am cognitively disabled, physically disabled, chronically ill, developmentally disabled, and psychiatrically disabled, so I have experience with a lot of different disability communities. I often feel like an outsider in all of them, but the one I feel most at home in is the developmental disability self-advocacy community. This is because it’s not a community based on a diagnosis, but a community based on a history of shared experiences, an

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