Sitting Pretty

Unfixed quote

Sometimes life can be dreadful, and I’m not just here to bear witness to the shiny parts. When my son thinks of bravery, I hope he understands the strength of vulnerability—of feeling his suffering and sitting with another’s.

Navigating childhood cancer and subsequent paralysis due to her treatments initiated author and professor Rebekah Taussig, Ph.D into a world of uncertainty and pain very early. Too early. But with her intelligence and piercing inquiry into the human experience, Rebekah is so much more than her first book title suggests—Sitting Pretty. Rebekah is Sitting Unflinchingly, Sitting Indispensably, Sitting Luminously. (Ok yes, and she’s darn pretty as well.) Do your heart a favor and navigate over to her exquisitely tender ‘mini-memoirs’ on her IG page @sitting_pretty or her website for a collection of her published essays that explore what it means to live with disability.

Her son Otto’s 3rd birthday (photo on the left) is particularly poignant as Rebekah reflects on her third year of life that brought a cancer diagnosis and decades of believing bravery meant smiling and sucking it up. 

Now, she knows it’s so much more and writes, “The sounds of injury are just as important as the sounds of joy.”

Would you like to read the Unfixed memoir chronologically? Or have you missed previous chapters? You can access them all for free with the link below: