easy beauty a memoir by chloé cooper jones

I don’t feel negatively about the fact that it’s hard for me to move around the world or that I might experience pain in doing that. But for me, I don’t feel negatively about that. “A lot of times people equate something being hard or struggling with something as something not worth doing or something that we should have a negative feeling about. Over the phone I ask her, what is the difference? People don’t always recognize the difference.” As she states in Easy Beauty, “I’m not helpless, I’m struggling. That’s normal to me as maybe hunger is for you.”Īccording to Cooper Jones, these concerned, doubting voices have the potential to limit her far more than her disability. But for me, I’ve always been managing this pain. There’s a before and after, right? There’s your ankle before you broke it, and then the after, and the after feels worse and it makes things feel harder. “I was born with this disability and I was born into this body. “I’ve never lived a life without this level of discomfort or pain,” she explained. I related this story to philosophy professor, journalist, and Pulitzer-finalist Chloe Cooper Jones, whose recently released memoir Easy Beauty chronicles her lifetime of disabled travel, and I asked where she finds the wherewithal to push through the pain and hardship.

My travels have been strained by chronic pain ever since, and they probably always will be. Once there I could barely get around the place, for with each step my ankle rattled and shifted like a sack of marbles. After it happened, rather than waiting some wise duration to properly heal, I skittered off on yet another bout of travel (apparently you can get itchy feet even if one of those feet is dangling at the end of a trimalleolar fracture) and limped with a too-heavy backpack to Bangkok.

A few years back I suffered a silly accident that had decidedly unsilly consequences in the form of a severely broken ankle.

Easy beauty a memoir by chloé cooper jones