Sixty Quotes From the World Inside a Coffee Mug: What My 2014 Novella Is Teaching Me Today

I’ve written elsewhere about my intention to revisit a novella I wrote over a decade ago about a world inside a coffee mug, as excerpted below:

“Light-Roasted Spider Fems is a re-imagining and expansion of a fantasy novella I wrote and published on a limited-run of approximately 100 copies more than ten years ago about a boy who falls into a coffee mug. I wrote the novella while living in Accra, Ghana in 2014 learning about disability activism. Rereading it in 2025, I expected to be embarrassed by the quality of my early writing and the ways it lacked the greater nuance and sensitivity that I now bring to social justice and disability issues (and I was). But I was also confronted with a raw, stream of consciousness snapshot of my 20-year-old self processing my disabled, neurodivergent, and queer identities while grappling with trauma related to the Boston Marathon bombings. I also found myself exploring my emerging awareness of the intersections between ableism, capitalism, and other types of social injustice and how I relate to movements working to dismantle them and to envision new realities. Approaching this novella with fresh curiosity, I decided it would be interesting to revisit that same world with a new story that explores internalized ableism, disabled identity development, learning and unlearning, saviorism, and the emotional aftermath of an explosion. In doing so, I hope to honor the story’s original intent in a reflexive and thoughtful way by writing disabled characters and using the profits from any sales to advance projects aligned with disability justice in Ghana and other settings in the Global South through the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund.”

I have written elsewhere about the cultural heritage of Anansi spider tales in Ghana and my personal connection to them over the years. While this re-write will not be a true Anansi story, I am intentionally referencing this story-telling tradition in the new title for this work.

Overall, this is a project I hold somewhat sensitively, because for years I felt embarrassed by it. In addition to the issues described above, several readers also told me the book didn’t make much sense, that it was too “out there,” and I took that feedback more harshly than I needed to. The book was tackling questions and themes that still matter to me today, even if I wasn’t yet writing with the care, specificity, and clarity I write with now.

I have conceived this project of revisiting the novella in three parts: (1) fully rewriting a new story in the same world as the original novella that honors its themes and also repurposes text from the original, (2) writing a reflexive, autoethnographic essay(s) to accompany the updated novella/novel to describe my journey with writing and re-writing this project, mistakes and corrections I made, and what I learned along the way, and (3) publishing the updated novella/novel via traditional or self-publishing and using any profits I generate to help fund global disability justice projects that I have remained engaged with over the decade since writing this.

I’m writing this essay as an early step in the process of rewriting the novella. By sitting with quotes from the text that still resonate with me, or that continue to teach me something upon rereading them, I’m trying to challenge the self-consciousness I feel around the work. I hope this activity will help me to approach this project with curiosity instead of moralization, and with less defensiveness about mistakes I made along the way, which I will also examine explicitly through the autoethnographic essay(s).

With that introduction in place, I will turn now to the quotes themselves. I’m not offering these excerpts as a defense of the novella necessarily, but as a way of appreciating it enough to warrant my revisiting/engaging with it again. I’ll move through sixty quotes — one from the foreword, a few from each of the sixteen chapters, and one from the afterward.

Foreword

“I think it is important to tell you I am NOT a person living with a chronic disability, writing from my own experiences. I am just a twenty-year-old who found out early that my passion is fighting for the rights of people with disabilities in developing countries.”

This quote from the foreword captures some of the main shifts in my perspective over the past decade. First, I was careful then to clarify that I was not a person with a chronic disability writing directly from those experiences. Rather, I understood myself as someone with intermittent and invisible disabilities — experiences I assumed didn’t matter enough to claim, which is why I made the main character physically disabled. I also did not see yet how the book was about my own experiences with disability, as I tend to write at more of a subconscious level. Second, while the book engages with ideas I now locate within critical disability studies, I was still linguistically approaching disability through a human rights framework, which is reflected in my use of the term “rights”. Third, my use of the phrase “developing countries” reflects the fact that I had not yet adopted a decolonial perspective in my understandings of social justice globally.

Chapter One

“My name is Brenton Benison, and I am thirteen years old, and there are a number of things about my life that just don’t make good sense to me. There are however at least two things I know for sure. One. I know disability can be a queer thing to talk about. And two. I know many people choose to pass through life on a journey toward It. Those two things, I think, are why I needed to go on my adventure to the world inside my mother’s coffee mug — so that I could uncover the truth. Life is not for finding It. It is for finding you.”

While I didn’t fully recognize this at the time, the line “disability can be a queer thing to talk about” now strikes me as a powerful way to name the deep intersections between queerness and disability, including the shared roots of queer and crip theory. Throughout the novella, there is also this idea of “It” which essentially represents a mythological land of normalcy everyone is supposed to aspire to. Brenton the main character rejects this, which speaks to the ways I was rejecting “It” in my own life at the time.

“I swam farther than I had ever swum before or will ever swim again, hoping and then praying — though I had no faith there was any difference — that some boat or some person would materialize above to rescue me. But then I remembered something. I didn’t want to be saved. I wanted to escape. So with one last gulp of air, I slipped into the world below.”

In the opening chapter, Brenton decides whether to jump into the world inside his mother’s coffee mug, and he decides to go. His choice is summed up in the line, “I didn’t want to be saved. I wanted to escape.” The theme of saviorism recurs in the book, reflecting something I was grappling with at the time as a queer person, navigating others’ impulses to “save” me, and as someone engaged in international disability rights work. I was asking then repeatedly: what were the appropriate ways for me to engage with this work? While there were certainly moments when I participated in white and disability saviorism tropes (i.e., through my words, actions, and even in how I tried to market this book), revisiting it now also reveals how my I was actively pushing back against those very dynamics in my writing.

Chapter Two

“It is not easy to live somewhere that everyone thinks smarter than you and talks faster than you and seems better at doing just about everything… But you are not worthless or pathetic. Your family appreciates looking at you and will cherish entertaining with you. There are even some things you can do well like packing sugar. So you are valuable to us. We will take care of you. We will keep you safe and happy. And we will never laugh at you. So do not wander away from us. It is selfish to wander…”

The second chapter of the novella is a crash course in the charity model of disability, with Brenton landing in a family that perceives him as disabled (i.e., “dumb and dinky”), who pity him, and who immediately impose extreme limitations on who he is allowed to be and what he can do. When Brenton rebels against this, he is immediately arrested by the city guard, who put him in a cell, emphasizing how Brenton’s deviance as a disabled person is understood as socially unacceptable and dangerous.

“We walked away, forward — which is really just saying we were moving somewhere because when you find yourself in a place as round as the inside of a coffee mug, forward and backward start to seem very much like other words like freedom and captivity that can be nothing more than the most relative of expressions.”

This quote is a pointed critique of capitalistic American society (which the city in the novella represents) and how it emphasizes individual freedom but at the same time controls us culturally, structurally, economically, and politically. This is one of the novella’s first attempt’s to suggest a connection between disability/ableism and capitalism.

Chapter Three

“She was a lot to take in. In a world where coverings never deviated far from the pastel, she had dyed hers an eerie green. I could hardly tell if there was any writing left on them anymore. She wore a sugar hat and a sugar scarf too — the hat navy and the scarf gold. She was almost three times my height, and at first, I mistook her for a man but since she said she wasn’t a man, this meant to me that she wasn’t. Chai was more than a little put off by her. “You wouldn’t be willing to show us your certification, dear…”

The third chapter opens with Brenton meeting his first in a series of ‘guides’, who is presented as a genderqueer/trans person. I don’t remember identifying as trans until more than a year later, and so it was interesting to see such a clear representation of genderqueerness in my writing. This reminds me of something important — sometimes we know things before we know the name that others have given to them.

“You ought to send him to Foam… The Foam School… it’s a school for Fools, Oddballs, And Misfits… FOAM… A few parents and I, we just couldn’t handle our dumb and dinky children, so we came together to found Foam… They live in their own world there… separate from ours… it’s for the best… because let’s be frank, they don’t belong here… best to send them somewhere they do… and when they come back, they are normal enough to make a suitable transition.”

The chapter then turns to a very on-the-nose exploration of integrated vs. segregated school for disabled children and also the role of parents in shaping the lived experiences of disabled and queer children.

“4:30 | Room 277 | ‘Managing Your Madness’ — A Seminar on Means, Motivations, and Musings”

While I did not use the word mad to describe my brain until years later, it was again interesting to find madness mentioned several times in the book, with this being one of the first mentions.

Chapter Four

“This class was less remarkable than the two before it, but it was more disheartening. If you were at listening to the professor and silencing your own thoughts and writing down what he said on his daily exams precisely as he had said it earlier in class, you did well and were considered smart. You were then allowed to sit toward the front of the curved hall. The worse you did, the father back you moved. I was sitting in the back in no time at all. By the time we left for our final class of the day — the one about managing madness — this class was starting to sound useful to me because by then, I was feeling more than a little mad.”

I was also surprised to find that I already understood madness to be something that is constructed by institutions and society, as Brenton identifies his madness as relating to his experience navigating school.

“I continued, ‘And you don’t find other worlds by reading about them or discussing them. You find them by creating them yourself or by jumping into ones that you happen to stumble upon.’ ‘Brenton,’ the man said, sighing a little, ‘let us get what could be a very nasty discussion over with, once and for all. Will you tell us about this world you claim to have revisited?’ The answer I gave was honest and immediate, but I was nervous saying it. ‘I was born there. I was living with my mother, the one who created this coffee mug, until one day, I decided to create her coffee all by myself, and the reason I did that was so I could enter this world and see what it was like. So I jumped in, and eventually I found my way here to Foam.” ‘I see,’ he said, ‘And do you have any evidence besides that of a story to support such a belief.’ ‘Well –’ I didn’t know how to answer that. I had never thought like this before. ‘The cat from our house, he fell in too, so if I could find them, that would be proof.’”

The chapter then shifts into a classroom setting where there is a debate about what constitutes knowledge, and Brenton experiences the confusion and hurt that comes when people doubt or question your lived experience.

“During its course, I was told many times and in many ways to be silent, but as I thought back, there was really only one person who had actually succeeded, and that was the Duke of It when he had asked me for proof or a reason to believe in where I came from. I wondered if I could find the cat. I wanted to. And sometimes, when you decide you want to do something, there can come a time when you realize you need to do that thing too, and if the people inside are not letting you do what you need to, then you must find a way to answer a most critical question. Are you brave enough to escape — not just away from one person, but away from entire worlds of people and entire ways of thinking that you just might think are all wrong?”

The chapter concludes by identifying that Brenton is not just escaping from individual people who are trying to constrain and marginalize him, but entire ways of thinking (i.e., ableism, heterosexism, and transphobia).

Chapter Five

“I think safety and imprisonment are two words that be easily confused for one another.”

The fifth chapter opens with the observation that actions done in the name of the protection and safety of certain people can actually be means of controlling them and keeping them from freedom.

“Once Pocillo was also made up to Chai’s satisfaction, and she had separated him from his cup, we all piled back into the vehicle and maneuvered to a different side of town. This area was brighter, and the buildings were taller, and everything was all around much nicer. Our destination was an enormous six-story structure. All the neighboring homes were shorter and less grand than this once.”

The dinner party that Brenton’s parents take him two introduces the idea of class within the city, and how much of the behavior of Brenton’s parents is driven by their desire to appeal to their friends in the upper-class.

“‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Leaving — isn’t it obvious?’ ‘But where are you going to go?’ ‘I don’t care,’ I yelled, throwing the chair in place and racing toward Chai’s air tank and pulling it over my shoulders, ‘As long as it is somewhere far away from here.’”

In this chapter, Brenton finally makes his escape from his family and the city he finds himself in. He doesn’t have a clear plan but is motivated to escape by the emotional harms he has experienced. He has had enough. I found this relatable to my journey of “escape” from environments and relationships that have felt like traps to me. That escape was not well planned out but rather occurred suddenly acting on emotional impulse.

Chapter Six

“I did not understand then why they called us dumb and dinky people. Fine, I was shorter than them, so I could understand calling me dinky, but I could walk and think and do things just as quick and as well as anyone else. The only thing they could do faster was talk.”

This passage highlights how part of Brenton’s escape involved challenging the language other people used to describe him. While he did not yet know how he wanted to be defined, he recognized what felt wrong to him. I feel like this resonates with how a lot of people come to identify as queer and trans and disabled; it is through realizing they are not straight, not cis, or not able-bodied/minded and asking: who am I then?

“At the moment, I felt for Chai. Because even if it was just in my imagination, she seemed in a way just as trapped as I did. And that feeling translated into panic and a need to run as fast I could to ensure that I did not get trapped like she was.”

This quote is doing multiple things. First, Brenton empathizes with the people oppressing them, seeing how they are also oppressed by the systems they partake in. Second, seeing how decent people could get trapped in these systems and become something terrible scared Brenton deeply and was one of his major impulses in running away.

“‘You set those bombs off!’ I cried. He did not deny anything. Instead, he pulled a small backpack from his bag with a similar harness to the one he was wearing.

Brenton’s escape would have proved short-lived, if he was not soon aided by two people (who were both queer and affiliated with the trans character). While no one is physically harmed in the sugar bombs, Brenton’s escape also occurs through some amount of violence.

“First, Mocha was sitting there, her eerie green coverings shimmering in the dim light as she stood and rushed over to me. Second and more surprising was that Mocha was not wearing her legs. Rather next to her, there were a pair of stilts, and without those, she was just as dinky as me. And finally, and most surprising of all, sitting on a cushion next to her was the cat. I was not as alone in the escape as I had once imagined.”

The chapter ends with several reveals. First, the trans character was deliberately passing as nondisabled, despite being disabled, and working to help free Brenton (and others like him). This is a subversive act that is turning societal attitudes about disability on their head and using them in the pursuit of freedom and justice. Secondly, the trans woman has the cat from Brenton’s world with her, which symbolizes that not only does she believe Brenton’s lived experience, she has the ability to help him prove it. Brenton concludes with the realization that he is not actually alone.

Chapter Seven

“‘So are you one of us?’ I interrupted. She paused, staring sassily at me, ‘I’ve had quite enough of this us versus them tish-tosh. I am one with everyone — us and them. Fine, some have called me a dumb and dinky person, and some may call you that. But with my stilts, I am bigger than anyone. And I can already talk faster than anyone. So am I really dinky? Am I really dumb?’”

When Brenton asks the trans character if she is “one of us” (i.e., disabled), the character responds by aggressively dismissing labels, questioning the meaning of the societal categories they have inherited. This highlights one of the definitional tensions with disability — how it can exist in relation to social and political norms that we as disabled people are also resisting.

“All our troubles started the day the stirring sticks began turning about. They were stirring so fast no one knew what to do. House collapsed in the whirlpools, and people were thrown everywhere. There were so many who died or were injured or lost their livelihoods. The officials responded by putting up a net — the same net you came through to get here — so if anything of this nature ever happened again, no one would fly off into the emptiness. It was a good thing too because soon the entire mug was turned upside down, and we were left hanging from the next. We called those days The Great Turnings. And the world was indeed turned into disarray. You do not appreciate the need for order until you live in a place devoid of it, and there was no order, only desperate people desperate to restore it, and many believed that order could only be achieved through divisions. And it was achieved — at the extent of so many other things. Most are tall; some are small. It was a fact waiting to be exploited. There is nothing like a common enemy to stabilize a city. And what is an enemy other than someone who is different than you?”

The next section of the chapter provides a background to the history of the city — how it was formed in response to environmental disaster. From there, there was civil unrest, which was quieted by making out the disabled population to be a common enemy and removing them from the city. This was followed by the construction of a net/wall to keep people in and out. The nature of difference is described in terms of bodily characteristics (height) which suggests relevance to racism and other systems like racism.

“So the Sugar Tree Guard came to be, and the dumb and dinky people were not allowed into the city anymore unless they were adopted by families like yours, and even then we were not allowed to get coverings. If we go to Sugar Tree, we receive patterns that say ‘Dumb and Dinky person’ all over because that’s all we are to them. And there were other restrictions too that affected everyone — mostly surrounding who could tie the knot with who after graduating school.”

The creation of the wall led to the creation of a military force to defend the city, and most disabled people were locked out of the city where they were (a) not protected from environmental disaster and (b) locked out of resources. For those disabled people allowed in the city, they were second-class citizens with rules applying to them, such as who they could marry. This is another one of the novella’s explicit connections to queerness.

“‘I am not a dumb and dinky person.’ I continued on, writing other things of the sort, and there was nothing Sugar Tree could do. I could feel the tree swaying around in agony, and I was certain that those outside would be panicked.”

Brenton quickly discovers that the people who helped him escape have their own agenda; they want him to help them do a piece of activism against the Sugar Tree. He agrees to help but is ill-prepared for it, and the action ends up going disastrously wrong. This speaks to how disabled and other marginalized people are often thrust into activist roles in their communities even when they are not entirely ready for them. This also marks Brenton’s first defiance of the language society has imposed on him. The Sugar Tree, which represents religion and how the city is weaponizing it, is the source of this language and is also the site of his rebellion.

Chapter Eight

“After the doors, there were some signs that listed the documents required for exiting and entering once again. No documents were needed for exiting. However, the list of documents for re-entry ran all the way down from the ceiling to the floor.”

After a short chase, Brenton and his friend soon escape the city, where they are confronted with the reality of the world outside the wall. As they pass through the wall, the idea of the city having a regulated immigration that controls entering (but not leaving) is referenced.

“Within just a few seconds, I saw more people than I had seen throughout my entire stay in the city. And every single person was like the two of us — dumb and dinky. When the fence was pushed aside, many of the people rushed forward, but the cold turkeys forced them back with metal rods. The people were shouting. Some had metal rods too, and as we drove past them, many hit our machine with them using all of their might. Although the sound off all this was terrifying, our machine was built to withstand far greater strikes than that.”

As soon as they leave the city and enter the world beyond, they confront a mob of disabled people (like them) fighting to re-enter the city.

“And it was not just men and women, it was children too — staring up at us with their hands open as if asking for food. They all wore air tanks, but the tanks that they wore were much smaller, which meant that they would have to refill them more often, and something told me people here might struggle to pay for that air. The coffee here was disgusting. It was polluted with every filth imaginable — human waste, old clothes, and plastic bags of all sorts.”

This passage introduces several ideas about the world at once. First, the people outside the city do not have the same access to food as people in the city, and many are starving. Second, air is regulated and paid for, and people outside the city struggled to pay for the air they needed to survive. And third, the world outside the city lacked the same sanitation and waste management systems as the city and served as a dumping ground for the city’s waste (e.g., old clothes and plastic bags).

Chapter Nine

“As we drove through the world again, I was able to more clearly part the good from the bad, realizing that both existed here just as they existed in the places I had come from. There were people working and selling things, which seemed good. They were also people who didn’t work, which I thought wasn’t all together bad unless they wanted to work and couldn’t.”

On his second day in the world outside the city, Brenton expresses a more nuanced view of this world — seeing strengths and positives in addition to the problems he notes on the first day. He also recognizes that people are surviving via commerce/capitalism and places a value judgment on this — that it “seems good”. He also sees however that there are some people who are functioning in different ways outside this mode of production.

“Desperation is horrible. People pleading for the mercy of other people is horrible. And there is no one who will change my mind on this. Because of what I have seen.”

Brenton also shares a more nuanced view on the world outside of the city on his second day — that his main concern with it is “desperation” and how people I forced to plead to the city for their own survival.

Brenton and his friend visit a hotel/hostel where they replenish their air supply, and he notes that the air here tastes polluted. This again raises environmental injustice issues related to the city polluting the air and water/coffee of the world outside the city.

“But Doppio cut back in, ‘Poor creatures, they’ve never heard of This-And-That…living like savages I expect… but once they have the Letters, and they hope… and then they might become fine folks like us… they can become more like people if you know what I mean.”

Brenton then meets two people who are described as missionaries, and what follows is a very on-the-nose critique of missionary activity, highlighting how the missionaries view the disabled people outside the city as “savages,” at least until they read the Letters (the Bible) and come to believe in This-And-That (Christianity).

“I started my own charity,’ he explained. ‘Unlike Ristretto here, I don’t stand by the world of business…wanted to do some good in this world…so lately, our charity has been pleading with corporate bodies for any sort of donations we can get… we just got a donation actually from an architect in the city… he seemed so eager to help us.”

The ways in which missionary activity intersects with charity / the non-profit system is then explored. This includes a specific naming of how charity often tries to smooth over the problems associated with capitalism while also appealing to those very same corporations for money.

“Well the ones that are completely helpless… and are disabled… and aren’t capable of doing anything at all… their parents usually leave them at our doorstep,” Doppio began. “We do our best with them… but we can only do so much… The other children though, they come straight to us from the Beginnings Factory…and those are the ones who are available for adoption into the city.”

This next section explores how there are a certain types of disabled people who are abandoned by their families because they are viewed as too disabled to manage in this society. This is essentially a system of institutionalization for disabled people. An adoption system for children from the world outside the city into the city is then introduced, which importantly is managed by the charity and missionary system.

Chapter Ten

“I can’t tell you how we got to the Beginnings Factory because I don’t remember, but we did. And inside, I found an enormous factory with a ceiling that was a mirror and with aisles and aisles of shelves and conveyor belts that hummed and stretched in every direction.”

Outside the city, Brenton encounters various factories/farms that supply the city with vital resources, in this case the people themselves. This is suggestive of colonial modes of production.

“Out here, we confronted something disgusting. It was one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen in any world. Before us was a pile of stilts lying next to a great vat of glue and some workers who were gluing the stilts onto the legs of the babies. And in one second, I understood the terrible secret of our world. The people in the city were not actually taller than us. They had just made themselves taller. And we were not actually dumb and dinky people. They had just made us seem like that.

Brenton discovers that the difference between the disabled and nondisabled people is socially constructed at birth and then metabolized throughout their lifetimes of differences in access and opportunity. This reflects his understanding of the social model of disability.

Here even more workers were unloading the babies and placing them onto carts, which I supposed would be used to bring the babies into the city. I had seen enough, and so we hurried away from the workers and found a staircase that led back into the outdoors. I was mad, and I had no one to talk to about being made either, which made me even madder.”

Once again, the word “mad” surfaces, and while it is partially referring to anger here, it is interesting how once again Brenton’s madness is a reaction to coming to understand the brokenness of society. Him being “mad” is positioned is positioned as a response to (a) witnessing injustice and (b) having nobody to discuss it with and share that madness with.

“So this was where the cold turkeys were raised — way out here alone in a desolate place with no one to really care for or tend to them. No wonder they turned out so bad. Could you blame them?”

Brenton also discovers how the city’s military is produced by isolating disabled people from their families and raising them separately for this role in society. He feels empathy towards the people in the military who turn out that way and sees how it is not necessarily their fault. This relates to how American society often economically and otherwise marginalizes populations and then recruits them for the military and related roles.

Chapter Eleven

“‘If the city is free,’ he answered, ‘The people outside the wall will become freer too. And what else can we do to help them? If we tear down the wall and let them in, the whole world won’t become like the city. The city will just become like the wilderness again. And isn’t it better for some to have order than for everyone to have wilderness?’ I didn’t have an answer to this. I knew that it was unfair to have order when that order was built on a lie — the lie that some people were bigger than others and deserved more than others. But without that lie, it seemed like the whole city would crumble. So I stopped thinking about these sorts of questions because if I kept thinking about them, I would have just sat there thinking for a lone time and done nothing with my life. Besides, if I did happen to come to any answers, I probably would have just been lying to myself.”

In this section, a character (previously portrayed as trying to control how knowledge is constructed) offers his take on freedom and order, suggesting that some type of order is necessary to prevent the world from slipping into environmental disaster (the reason the city was originally constructed). Brenton doesn’t accept this, and after noting that it wasn’t sensible or fair to build a city on a lie, he determines that if he continues to philosophize endlessly about this, it will impede his own freedom journey.

“‘I would not expect so,’ he said, ‘It took many years before I knew. The net over the city is rainbow to remind us that freedom can only exist if there is a city. This is because freedom can only exist with order. Out here in the wilderness, there is no order, so we are slaves to nature, which is not freedom. Only a fool who has never left the city will imagine the wilderness if free. If it were free out here, why do so many people rush towards the gates of the city to leave this place?”

This passage, which is a continuation of that character’s worldview, could be read as an erasure of ways of living before the city (i.e., pre-colonial) and assuming that they were not free because they lacked certain infrastructure the city has. He also uses the observation that people from outside the city want to come into the city as evidence of the city’s goodness, ignoring how the city created the conditions outside the city. This directly connects to tropes in United States and other charity work that tries to “save” or “help” people whose living conditions are a result of colonization and economic systems in the Global North. While I did participate in some of those tropes around this time, I was also reckoning with them and challenging them.

“Lies save us from searching, but the truth never does. The truth only ever leads us on an unsettling journey to freedom.”

If the novella has a thesis, amidst all its psychedelics and musings, it is here. Truth is not about arrival at some set body of knowledge; it is about a journey, a way of lifelong learning, and that is where freedom is found.

Chapter Twelve

“A few children were also bouncing a ball up and down on some of the upper stairs of the pit. I watched them, and when I grew tired of watching, I stood up, and balancing carefully, I wheeled myself over to one of the sloping sides where the steps began. I could not climb unless I crawled, and it was a long way up, and crawling that far was going to be difficult.”

When Brenton jumps into the well, he has a vision that is a hybrid of the world inside the coffee mug and his home. This is the first time it is directly revealed that Brenton has a physical disability and uses a wheelchair. This is one of the main reasons I have felt retrospectively uncomfortable with the book, that I wrote about a physical disability I did not have at the time. However, I can see now clearly that I was nonetheless writing from my first-person perspective as a disabled person about the social model of disability, and so the particulars of Brenton’s lived experience related to his physical disability were not a major part of the story. Furthermore, the reason I felt pressured to make Brenton physically disabled was because of my own socialized/internalized ableism that the types of disability I lived with were not enough to write about because they were not visible.

“Many men and women alike knelt down and started crying, shrieking about how they wished so very much that I wasn’t as I was and how they wished I could become better.”

What follows is another on-the-nose exploration of “cure” and how “cure” is weaponized within religion. Brenton is brought into what amounts to a church service where they undertake a ritual to change him and make him nondisabled, which he does not want and does not consent to.

“The men spoke many words about why they thought I looked the way that I did, which was silliness because even I didn’t know. Then they returned to the back and came forward again with a number of baskets, each with a different cat inside.”

The novella discusses at a fair amount of length how religion functions to try to define disabled people, which Brenton rejects outright because he does not even understand himself and why he is the way he is. In this section, he insists on the ability and chance to define himself.

“They were chanting, ‘Change him!’ and I couldn’t help but think I had never much asked for this sort of change.”

He also rejects interventions to change his body and who he is, identifying that being disabled is inherent to who he is and is not what he asked for.

“The men grabbed me again to stretch me, and I closed my eyes. I was afraid of them. I was afraid of being made helpless by people who did all sorts of horrible things in the name of helping me.”

Out of any claim in the novella, “I was afraid of being made helpless by people who did all sorts of horrible things in the name of helping me” is perhaps the most outright rejection of saviorism and types of helping that violate the dignity and consent of the people being served. Outside of disability “cures”, this scene is a direct parallel of conversion therapy.

“And as I continued to float, my inaction was making this state permanent because the land was slipping farther away. And I could have stayed like that. I think I could have stayed like that forever.”

Brenton is depleted after all this, to the point he almost gives up on life and succumbs to drowning. While this is not explicitly made out to be a suicide attempt, it suggests the life-and-death nature of this type of violence.

“Even though they were all fighting for causes different than me, I would fight with them. I wanted to fight with then. I wanted to fight with them because I had a reason to believe in their fight. Many would not understand the reasons why I would be fighting, but that wouldn’t matter because I would know why I was fighting. And once you know what you want to fight for in life, the battle of finding yourself is already almost won.”

The chapter concludes with Brenton deciding he is ready to participate in activism. He has had an experience that has made him angry enough to act. He also recognizes that while others may be fighting for other causes and reasons, he had his own reasons, and it was not essential for others to understand his reasons for him to participate meaningfully in the fight. This again resonates strongly with my experiences of invisible disability and also queerness when I was closeted or not open about it— people not understanding why I was sensitive and aware of certain topics, but that being okay as long as I could still contribute in the activism/fight.

Chapter Thirteen

“‘It’s not even your fight.’ This made me angry because I liked Frappe, and it was my fight. ‘No — they’re not. If anyone’s being used, it’s you. You’re being used by a stupid pathway that some crazy Sugar Tree made up to waste your life away and distract you from really living.”

When Brenton and his friend have a conflict over the pathway forward (looking for It vs. returning to the city for activism), Brenton rejects the pathway towards It (the spiritual pathway towards some abstract, philosophical, ideal and normal place). He is offended that his friend cannot see how the fight was also his fight. In his anger, he deliberately uses disability-related language to describe this philosophy/religion as disabling (“stupid and “crazy”) rather than describing himself that way.

“It’s funny because when you leave behind a friend like this, in the very back of your mind, you don’t actually think it’s going to be the last time you talk to them. Rather, way back in your mind, you think the words you are saying aren’t actually what you mean, and you think some day, you’ll laugh about all this with them and realize how pointless all of it was, and things will be the same as they once were.

What follows is a nuanced discussion of the experience of losing friends over political and justice issues because they relate to your lived experience and you are unable to sacrifice them for the sake of the relationship.

“‘We are the sugar tree fairness federation,’ she cried. ‘And we are ready to fight with you, beside you, and for you — Brenton.”

What happens next in the novella could be read as an act of saviorism on Brenton’s part — he is thrust to the front of a movement, despite lacking the experience of the others. However, importantly, this is something that occurs due to circumstance, rather than his active choice or desire. While he is consenting to it this time (he was not previously), he also has little control or direction over how his story and experience is being wielded. This speaks to a lot of the real struggles that occur in political and social justice advocacy when people’s lived experiences get tied up in causes and organizations that become bigger than their own. While the novella does not offer answers to this, it does raise this as a challenge and concern. Brenton wants to make social change and realizes his story is a way to do it, but is it right to center himself and what will be the impacts?

Chapter Fourteen

“‘I don’t hate Sugar Tree,’ I continued. ‘What I hate is when people try to control me or try to control other people and I hate how people here treat me — most especially the Sugar Tree Guard. They think I am just a dumb and dinky person, but I am more than that.”

The fourteenth chapter is devoted to a series of advocacy speeches and then a political march to the Sugar Tree. Brenton makes clear that the cause he is advocating for is ultimately against the militarization of the city and how it is controlling disabled people. He also rejects once again the city’s definition of him and insists he is more than that definition.

In this chapter, I also want to acknowledge that I borrowed a phrase from a disability organization I was collaborating with at the time without asking permission for use in some dialogue, mistakenly assuming proximity implied consent. This was a mistake, and I will be removing it from future versions of the project. While the scene was informed by my experiences working with that organization and other disabled activists, that influence did not justify using their language without consent in a work I shared publicly, even with the intention that profits would benefit their work and related groups. This is the sort of ethical issue I did not hold with the same level of consciousness a decade ago but that I do today.

Chapter Fifteen

“I was still uncertain about It. Yet if this were indeed all true, It was laughable. Because Sugar Tree had been planted on top of It. The very thing that so many people believed would lead them all the way toward It had actually been planted to hide It from them too.”

The fifteenth chapter opens with the discovery that the Sugar Tree (which represents religion) was planted deliberately to hide the entrance to the place the religion was encouraging them to find. This highlights how religion can be a source of manipulation rather than truth-telling.

“I had come back to fight. I had never believed It existed, but now that we had found It, I was a little conflicted. But did we even know that this was really It? There was no one way of knowing for sure. And even if it was It, there were no guarantees that It was anywhere better than here. More than that, it seemed cowardly to leave when I knew that here I had a role to play in making things better. ‘I’m staying.’ I said, and once I had said this, I knew that I meant it. Sometimes, it takes saying a thing to know that you mean a thing.”

Brenton decides not to leave for It and is motivated to stay in the world specifically because he wants to participate in the freedom fight happening above him. He felt that he had some role in that fight.

“‘But this isn’t about how you will feel!!!’ I cried. ‘This is about how I am going to live, and how you are trying to keep me safe and are preventing me from actually living how I need to.’ This stung her, but she was still shaking her head. ‘I have to protect you… nothing you say will change my mind…’ ‘Then protect me while we fight!’ I yelled. ‘Fight with me, and make sure we win the fight!’”

What occurs next is an emotional confrontation between Brenton and his mother, who wants to keep him safe by not letting him fight any further. However, Brenton insists that the best way for her to keep him safe is for her to fight alongside him and to help protect him during the fight.

“And for me, that was freedom — when I could face them and take everything they had written on me and flash it back at them proudly.”

The chapter ends with a powerful act of reclaiming. Brenton accepts everything they have written about him in this world being a “dumb and dinky” person and wears it proudly. This final action represents an acceptance of his disabled identity and him cripping how society has viewed him. This contrasts with how he talked even a chapter earlier about being more than a “dumb and dinky” person and being a person-first; here, he fully accepts and reclaims his disabled identity.

Chapter Sixteen

“I believe my story is real — and not because of the evidence. I believe my story is real because of a reason. And that reason is because my story is a story about myself that was written my myself.”

The final chapter of the novel concludes with a revelation that much of the story served also as an allegory for some events that occurred at Brenton’s school. Essentially, he was beat up and written on for being disabled. Brenton then thinks about to what extent whether what happened in the coffee mug reals and comes to the decision that stories we write ourselves can serve to demonstrate what we know about ourselves, a very meta comment as I return to reading this a decade later.

“I could tell you about my legs and about how I wish I could use them most of the time but how other times I wonder if maybe they are the ones who just don’t have a chair. I could tell you about praying for miracles and having people tell me that I should wait for one before living. I could tell you about confronting my fears especially the fears that other people have made me fearful of. I could tell you about learning how to march and how I learned that marching can be even more powerful act than escaping.”

Brenton then directly connects many of the novella’s observations about the social model of the disability, the charity model of disability, and “cures” to his own experience as a child with a physical disability, noting how sometimes he does wish to not have challenges but also views those challenges to be largely socially constructed. This is an insightful take on the tensions between the social and medical models of disability, questions that have dominated disability-related discourse for decades.

“It was blocked because of a protest. I wasn’t sure what for, but I felt connected anyway. I think anyone who fights for their own freedom is united somehow. In fact deciding whether or not to fight for who you are shouldn’t be your choice. You should already be fighting. Your question should be — will you fight as peacefully as you can? And once you realize your own freedoms, will you fight to give a voice to others? Because if you’re not fighting for yourself and for others and you have the ability to fight, I don’t think you are doing what you need to do.”

From there, Brenton concludes his reflections on advocacy with an explicit commitment to intersectional struggle, highlighting how movements are connected to one another and how people should fight for another (even when one movement may seem finished or to have won).

“The barrier is and always will be that you are just not brave enough yet to conceive of a world where I can.”

Brenton concludes by reiterating his commitment to the social model of disability and how other people’s impositions and limitations on him are what limits him, not his disability.

“If you feel sorry for me, I feel sorry for you. Because my life is going to sparkle like all the rainbow lights that once shone down on me when I was in a place I wanted desperately to escape from. Because I did escape. I really did.”

The novella concludes by making clear that although the book does deal with issues of political and social struggle, it is ultimately about Brenton and his escape from attitudes and ideologies that oppressed him.

Afterword

“You could hold an event at your school to raise consciousness about organizations that aid people with disabilities internationally!”

The afterword, entitled “Things You Could Do Next,” makes clear that while Brenton may have had clarity about his role in social struggles, I was still finding mine in real life. At the time, I was particularly uncertain how to ask others to support the work. The suggestions — follow the project website, talk to friends, volunteer with disabled people, learn about international disability rights, or seek travel opportunities abroad — reflected my privilege and were fairly superficial. I also asked people to post selfies drinking coffee from with a hashtag that included “mug shots” on social media, which, while thematically connected to the book, could be viewed as insensitive or trivializing to disabled people disproportionately impacted by carceral systems. For many years, I felt embarrassed about the potential harm caused by these promotional choices, but I also recognize that I was still learning and that only about a 100 copies of the book were ultimately sold. There also isn’t a definitive guide to contributing responsibly to disability-related causes internationally, and our global society as a whole continues to struggle with doing this work well.

I previously wrote a reflexivity essay in which I wrote critically about some of the mistakes and lessons I learned from this work a decade ago.

As part of ongoing efforts to align my work with justice and accountability, I have, at the time of publishing this essay, redistributed $500 of my income across four bail funds through the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund. This contribution exceeds the profits generated by the novella and serves as a concrete act of repair, acknowledging that the advancement of this work may have unintentionally come at the expense of incarcerated people. This redistribution reflects a commitment to ongoing reflection, responsibility, and solidarity with communities (such as multiply marginalized disabled people) impacted by structural oppression.

Concluding Thoughts

This was the first time I’ve read this novella in full over 10 years. And prior to doing so, I felt a significant amount of embarrassment about it and like it was something from my past that was extremely harmful.

There certainly were some mistakes that I describe above, including borrowship, centering myself in marketing, insensitive social media campaigns, and lack of nuanced awareness of my white privilege and explicit discussion of race/racism. But I think what I’m seeing clearly for the first time is that those missteps are not enough of a problem to warrant throwing this work out or erasing it from my life story or artistic history.

Instead, what I found upon revisiting this work was that while I did not necessarily know all the words, terms, and frameworks that academic and social justice spaces have given to experiences, I had a deeply embodied knowledge of what it means to be disabled, queer, and trans and how these relate to intersectional movements for social and political change.

This is who I was in 2014, at age 20.

I believe this novella is worth revisiting today in 2026, at age 31.

I hope to finish this re-write within the next two years.

Note: As another act to transform the text, I launched “coffeestrings” (shown above), a visual art companion collection to my novel-in-progress, Light-Roasted Spider Fems, in which I am taking photos of the original text written, liquifying and manipulating the pages, and painting over them. This project may evolve over time.