Rewilding My Brain: Folklore, Disability, and the Non-human World

Abstract:The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that one in four people in the United States currently lives with a disability. Such a prominent folk group—sixty-one million people—deserves more serious scholarly attention and engagement by folklorists. This autoethnographic essay explores the long-lasting and damaging personal, educational, and cultural impacts of misdiagnosed and misunderstood neurodivergence. The author invites readers to consider the key role folklorists can, and should, play in investigating the relationship between disability, folk medicine, and healing. The modern-day health care system—as well as schools’ diversity, inclusion, and equity programming—would greatly benefit from an academic interrogation of where suffering and omission occur on behalf of (in)visibly disabled folks, both historically and today.