Journaling Prompts for Living with Disability
Disability—whether visible or invisible, acquired or lifelong—shapes daily life in ways that most people around you don't see or fully understand. There's the practical reality of it, and then there's the emotional and identity layer: negotiating access, managing other people's assumptions, figuring out how to talk about it, and locating yourself within a world largely designed for a body or mind different from yours. Writing about it isn't about finding silver linings. It's about giving yourself a space to be honest about the full weight and texture of this experience, without having to manage anyone else's comfort.
Journaling Prompts
What do you wish people in your life understood about your daily experience that they currently don't—not because they're unkind, but because they haven't asked or you haven't had the space to say?
How has your relationship with your body or mind changed because of disability? What has required you to grieve, adapt, or renegotiate?
What do you find most exhausting about navigating a world not designed for you—not the disability itself, but the social, logistical, and emotional labor of moving through it?
What has disability revealed about your own resilience, creativity, or priorities that you might not have discovered otherwise? You don't have to be grateful for the difficulty to acknowledge what it's shown you.
What does a life well-lived look like for you—by your own definition, not by the comparison to what your life might have looked like otherwise? What are you building toward?