Days with only one arm
Prologue | That moment before dawn
That morning, I woke to discover I could not lift my right arm.
Strangely, I did not panic.
Not because I had expected it, or prepared myself.
But because it had already happened. There it was.
With it in front of me, all I could do was accept it.
So I turned over and closed my eyes again.
I thought sleep could repair everything, as night covers every wound.
But when I woke a second time, the numbness was still there.
Only then did I truly begin to panic.
In my confusion, I drank a glass of alcohol.
Its warmth dispersed a little of the cold fog inside me.
But my body did not recover.
My arm still hung from my shoulder like a heavy rope.
Chapter One | What was lost
On the subway, I gripped a strap with my left hand.
My right hand held my phone, but could not unlock it.
My thumb was numb. It could neither press nor swipe.
One hand was not enough.
In that moment, I suddenly identified as a disabled person.
Not through sympathy or imagination, but through pain I could feel in my own skin.
Getting dressed became almost impossible.
A sleeve caught on my arm, and I could not raise it.
Buttons needed two hands working together. I could not do it.
Every movement reminded me:
I had lost abilities I once took for granted.
Eating was the same.
Chinese food meant chopsticks, but my left hand could not use them.
I switched to fast food.
Mixed rice, burgers, spoons—none needed that coordination.
At that moment, I truly understood:
This world is built with “two hands” as its default.
“Disability is not an individual tragedy, but society’s failure to prepare for difference.”
— Mike Oliver
I began typing with my left hand.
I became more practiced, but the words inside me were always faster than my fingers.
Thoughts came in an instant; my fingertips struggled through mud.
In conversations with friends and family, I was forever falling behind my own words.
That stolen speed hurt more than the numbness.
So I tried dictation.
Speaking sentences and handing them to a machine.
But spoken language was always so direct.
It lacked the rhythm of fingertips dancing across a keyboard,
the spark of beating emotion into words with both hands.
“Pain is not the instant of screaming, but a slow and continual deprivation.”
— Elaine Scarry
I am learning a new kind of slowness.
Not an elegant composure,
but having no choice but to be slow.
Chapter Two | The default
I used to think my greatest gift was an able body.
I could run, jump, lift things, use my hands as I wished.
That was a complete kind of freedom.
Now half of it has been taken away.
Only now do I see that being able-bodied is itself a privilege.
As a trans girl, my relationship with my body was already complicated.
Hormones change my appearance, my moods, and my metabolism.
I once saw my body as a place that could be reshaped and retold.
Losing the use of my right hand reminded me:
Your body can betray you, too.
“Who I am” is often defined by “what I can still do.”
I have only just become an adult.
The oppression of being a minor still lingers inside me.
Now the shadow of “temporary disability” lies over it.
These labels do not cancel each other out.
They accumulate into an invisible net
that suspends me at the edge of the world.
Facilities, rhythms, rules: all assume everyone is able-bodied.
The height of a ticket gate, the width of a tray, a vending machine’s coin slot, required form fields,
and button layouts that are friendly only to right-handed people.
They do not insult you or drive you away.
They simply leave you no way to exist.
A reminder about “normal”: it is constructed, not natural.
— A Foucauldian perspective
When the majority claims “normal,”
difference is gently pushed aside,
like a sheet of paper squeezed through the crack beneath a door.
I understand that this is structural oppression.
Not one person’s malice,
but many apparently harmless choices
accumulating in the same direction.
If my right hand never recovers,
I will be forced to get used to this oppression.
To learn every action with my left hand and make inconvenience ordinary.
But that is not freedom.
It is compromise.
More cruelly, society will not even consider this a problem.
It will assume I have adapted,
ignoring the fact that I was excluded and deprived.
I am not afraid of being slow,
or of never learning to hold chopsticks left-handed.
I am afraid that I will eventually learn to settle inside oppression,
so comfortably that I forget to ask why.
Epilogue | Push the door open
I am not an isolated case.
Minors, women, trans people, disabled people, carers, people with chronic illnesses, night workers, single mothers, survivors of domestic violence…
At different moments, we become the system’s offcuts.
From different positions, we are gently flicked away by the world of two hands.
When some people’s ability to act is taken away,
everyone’s freedom diminishes.
I write this
not to ask for pity,
but to bring the invisible knife called the default
into the light.
This arm I cannot lift
is not a metaphor.
It is a real weight
inside every everyday movement.
All I can do is keep writing,
however clumsily, however slowly.
Words are the resistance I have left,
and my cry to this world:
We are not incomplete.
The world’s defaults make us so.
“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
— Foucault
If you, too, are fighting the default,
please do not be silent.
Write your slowness.
Hold up your pain.
Live your difference.
When the world once again makes two hands the only standard,
let us use one hand
to push
the door open.