My guest today, Rebecca Kaussig, is a Kansas City writer and teacher with a doctorate in creative nonfiction and disability studies.
For the last five years or so, she has grown this amazing global community on Instagram, where she crafts these kind of mini memoirs that take you into her world and experiences and identity, a part of which includes her near lifelong relationship with physical disability and the wheelchair that has given her so much freedom and mobility and so much more.
Rebeccas Memoir in essays sitting pretty the view from my ordinary, resilient, disabled body takes you into her life, creating this really beautiful, eye opening, funny, insightful portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.
And in today's conversation, we dive into all of this.
I learned so much, not just about Rebecca, but her family, her life, the mindset that has sort of fueled her lens, and also her passion for writing and creativity and how that has shown up in different ways throughout her life, especially more recently on Instagram and now in this beautiful new book.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
You know, it's funny, I was catching up with your Instagram account, and congrats, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
Good little baby Otto.
I was really touched by.
I don't know whether it was your most recent post or, like, it was a pretty recent post where you were reflecting on this moment where you're like, shouldn't I be the mom who sort of, like, bouncing the kid to comfort?
And I was just really moved by that whole reflection.
I wonder if you might share a little bit of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's been.
It's interesting because I wrote the book before Otto, and I found out that I was pregnant with Otto, like, less than 24 hours after I submitted the manuscript.
And so this baby has challenged a lot of the ways that I've seen my body in many directions, and one of them is a new way of accepting the limitations of my body.
It's one thing for me to feel like I can process my limitations as they affect me, but suddenly there's this baby that has very specific needs.