Broken then blooming

Dear Debriefers,

Happy new year and welcome back.

I'm proud to start the year with the results of Debrief's first open call for writing. We invited Debriefers to imagine a future... where disability rights are real.

Here are our favourite dispatches from 2050. They share the Events of the 2030s, the consequences of change, and how our vision of what disability is may change.

Read on for geopolitics, community gardens, and the terrible mistake made by editors of Disability Debrief.

New reader survey: help shape the direction of the Debrief in 2026 by sharing your feedback, and what you'd like to see more or less of on the newsletter.

About this edition

Disability Debrief can share these visions of a disabled future thanks to reader support.

Many thanks to those who contributed to our fundraising appeal for 2026: Andrew, Anne, Arthur, Catherine, Jennifer, Jody, Ilene, Kamil, Mark, Michael, Fatima, R, Ruth, Shrivaths and an especially generous gift from Laurel.

Kinanty Andini is an illustrator and digital artist from Indonesia.

“Broken and bloomed”

maitreya, from Bengaluru, India

Dear maitreya,

Something germinated from the compost and rubble of this city. I'm writing to you from a Bengaluru that has broken and bloomed.

As you feared, the city did crack under its thirst: dry taps, tanker mafias, gated wells. By 2030 the Cauvery was a trickle and the underground ran dry; glass towers emptied and peeled like bark. Collapse was daily weather.

Now the half-gutted glass towers are repurposed into vertical gardens and rain-harvesting structures. One houses a museum of loss. Its rooms hold photographs and videos and objects recovered from the floods, helping us remember what we surrendered, what we grieve.

The lakes breathe; I saw a flock of painted storks today. The lakes’ banks are open to people using wheelchairs or white canes and children chasing dragonflies. Buses kneel unhurried. Metro doors hum open to everybody; announcements are spoken, signed and captioned.

This was not easy. I remember your terror of collapse, of water scarcity, of unliveable heat, of gated communities pulling farther away from human need. Much of that did happen. There is no Mumbai as we know it anymore.

There were decades of fire, famine, and floods. The wealthy fled to sealed enclaves. We stayed and built our infrastructure as our community: seed banks, water points, tool libraries, neighbours trained in sign and touch. Our collectives repaired wheelchairs as readily as borewells.

The “we” that rose first were those the city had left out: disabled kin. Wheelchair users, blind and deaf folks, long-COVID spoonies. And so many more: migrant workers, street vendors, their children who had never belonged to gated futures.

We gathered in abandoned schools, half-finished flyovers and dry lakebeds. We cleared dead birds, cooked, planted and watched each other's children. Care became public wealth. Octavia Butler's whisper guided us: “all that you touch you change.” 

Others fled; we stayed, pulled asphalt like rotten teeth and sowed ragi, neem and beans. Disabled gardeners, neurodivergent designers, elders with aching knees and restless children became our teachers.

And now, maitreya, I must tell you something hard for you to hear. The worth you tied to usefulness was never the point. The most radical thing you did was rest: to lie down when the world demanded productivity, to dream. Those dreams seeded the guava trees, maps of new worlds, this commons of care.

These days I tend bitter gourd and sunflowers and teach movement groups in the evenings. When I am tired or ill my neighbours bring me food. The accessibility we ached for is real: metros without steps, markets textured for blind navigation, slowed for those of us who process differently.

There are still fractures. But we are no longer disposable. The city rewilds around us. Children harvest guavas on their way home; hunger remains but shame has gone.

So lie down, kanna. Rest, dream and soften. Every pause is a planting,

maitreya

“I have my own office!”

Bill Fry, from Rotterdam, the Netherlands 

Dear Debriefers,

Hello everyone! I'm from the future and I’m autistic. And it’s pretty neat! I know it seems completely unreasonable given how terrible the world seems for neurodivergent and disabled people right now, but I’m writing this letter to let you know things get better. And hopefully it won’t cause any paradoxes! HERE WE GO!

I just accepted a new job working freelance at an animation company in the Netherlands. I get to choose my own hours! Moving there from the UK was super-easy thanks to the Star-Rail, it only took me half an hour. No glaring noise, no cramped spaces and barely any sensory overload. 

The translucent blue walls were so spongy and soft that touching it has become one of my new favourite stims. Plus getting a view of Europe’s landscape travelling there was gorgeous, green and blues dancing together on the tiny hilltops like happy brushstrokes. It’s really recovered from all the roughness that happened in the 2030s and AAAAA THAT MIGHT BE SPOILERS SORRY. 

ANYWAY I’m actually sending you this letter on the computer in my own office right now. Yeah, I have my own office! Wild, right? I can listen to relaxing concentration music and the light of the screen is relaxing mellow yellow, perfectly fitting an autistic fellow like myself. It even has a setting to change what your desk smells like.

I finally feel like I can fully concentrate on my work, ESPECIALLY because it's to do with my special interests! Part of that was thanks to a new government scheme encouraging disabled people to find a job that works for them long-term, instead of just burning out doing jobs short-term like before.

Look, I know you feel like most of what I’ve said is just pure fantasy. That the world will never get better for disabled people. But that’s why I wanted to send this.

While I’m not gonna lie and say the world is perfect now, if you’re willing to take that step forward, to stand up for the things you rightfully deserve, to find people and communities that accept you and love for who you are, you’ll find that the world becomes a much kinder place.

Take care of yourself, past Debriefers!

Bill

“Is it bad, that I’m somewhat jealous of you?”

Jamie Hale, from London, UK

Dear ancestor,

It is very strange to write this, knowing you have no idea what’s coming. The future is good - at least that’s what everyone tells me. But when I look back, I can’t help but think about all the things we’ve lost.

I’m one of the remnants now. I remind people of what it was like before modern medicine came about, as it will in your lifetime. I don’t know why the adeno-associated virus didn’t work to cure me, when it worked on almost everyone else. Sometimes I tour medical schools. I train doctors on what it was like for people like us in the past.

Is it bad, that I’m somewhat jealous of you? I’ve never met someone else with their joints curled and their spine bent like me. They wanted me to live in a hospital, because ventilators are only used in intensive care now. I hear in the past you used to use them day to day, living in the real world, with other people. That you used to be part of the community.

Now that they can knit damaged nerves back together, heal brains, stitch motor fibres, there’s no real reason for anyone to stay disabled, so they don’t. It’s amazing, things that would have left people life-long broken can just be… undone. But for me it’s quite lonely, being the only one. They didn’t see it on the pregnancy scan, or I would have been eliminated then - the way many others have been. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. 

I went to the British Library last week and read some of the antique zines. The creators wrote that they didn’t want curing, only social change. I always thought that was rhetoric and they were lying to themselves. But maybe they weren’t.

Did you spend all your time dreaming about a cure? I sometimes wonder if it was different then, if you knew others. Would I want to be fixed so much if I had friends like myself?

I’ve got a penpal in Albania, who, like me, couldn’t be cured, but we’ll never meet. There’s no way of travelling for us. Apparently there used to be so many of you - us - that we had rights, and access to things?

Now with all the cures we’re so rare that nobody even thinks about that any more. I can’t walk up the steps so there would be no chance of me getting an aeroplane. Did you ever fly?

Sometimes I dream of freedom. Of finding other people like me.

But I won’t sign my name. I don’t want anyone else to know that I exist.

X

Watching the sunset

Alan Robinson, from Los Antiguos, a village in the Andes, Argentina.

Estimados Debriefers,

I am writing this letter from a small cabin in the Andes. I have finally fulfilled my dream of retiring to the peace of the forest with my partner, devoting myself to writing, going for walks among the trees and watching the sunset in the mountains.

When you reach this age, you might look back on the past and feel sad for what you couldn't do. But I want to remember with joy what we could do.

On a day like today, but 57 years ago, I began to be delirious and acquired a disability. At that time, when you were delirious, they locked you up in a madhouse and you received cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments.

Many of us dedicated our lives to demanding human rights for people with disabilities. Thanks to that this type of treatment was finally abolished throughout the world. We had a perspective of mutual support that placed special importance on relating lovingly to each other of activists. At the time we called this international cooperation “Mad Activism”.

I sip my wine, stare at the fire, and remember my fellow activists in Latinamerica. I remember and miss the many who have already passed away. They are part of our history: they were our leaders, our friends, and the ones who gave a voice to the neurodiversity movement when it was really hard to do so.

I remember when neurotypical people, therapists, and doctors rejected our presentation of ourselves as neurodivergent people with disabilities. It was not easy to get here. Not easy at all.

But here I am, listening to the sparks of the fire still burning. But there is still something I have to say.

We have not yet been able to amend the definition of disability in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Many social barriers have been lifted, but disability is still defined as an individual impairment in interaction with social barriers.

Personally I believe we need to change the concept of “impairment” to one of “difference”. It's just a word, but 57 years ago, when I began to experience delusions, doctors and therapists believed that my delusions were a impairment. But the way my mind has always worked is not a disorder, just a different way of perceiving reality.

Siempre con cariño,

Alan 

Survivors finally had common sense

Han, from Dali, Yunan, China

Dear Debriefers,

I am writing from our rebuilding centre. Nobody has ever imagined that equality could be built in such a fast and darkly humorous way; the past still feels so close to me. Let me walk you through how we finally achieved equal rights in a rapid 25 years.

We had a problematic reputation on disability rights, I know. In 2019, Wen Jun died during his investigation of accessibility in my city, Dali. In 2025, Wang Yingying was cyberbullied across all social media platforms because they believed it’s wrong for blind people to climb mountains with a guide dog. It even led to her losing her job as a masseuse.

The list could continue, but I need to tell you the drastic change.

The rise of the far right, the collapse of globalisation, and yes, climate change—all these buzzwords of the 2020s—turned into ferocious disasters at the beginning of 2030. We knew international power struggles and climate disasters would hit marginalised groups the hardest.

What we didn’t realise is that if it is bad enough, they would also hit the authorities and elites. Only when actually hurt by all types of disasters did those politicians and capitalists stop and try to solve problems without prioritising personal or parties’ interests. The love for nature did not unite us; the shared suffering did.

It sounds too dark, right? But it led us to an equal world now. Over the past decades, disaster mitigation and rebuilding became priorities. It shook our old idea of national strength against Western power, and it also reduced empty national pride without that overlooked the concrete needs and dignity of individuals.

Survivors finally had the common sense that every life is precious. For the first time, the whole world discussed de-growth together. Rebuilding, not just infrastructure, but also our social-ecological systems, helped integrate all rights.

Now, tactile paving is usable, no longer just a decoration, as it was in the 2020s. Schools no longer ‘integrate’ disabilities; they design inclusion into the education system. Disability is seen as the barrier that society has built, distinguished from impairment. You can see many more people in medical situations fully active in different societal roles. Yes, a short but intense revolution over the years.

Now I have to start my work in the community garden. Wishing you a beautiful day,

Han

“I am dismayed at your decision”

Margo Hammond, from an assisted living facility in St. Petersburg, Florida

Dear Editors,

I am dismayed at your decision to stop publication of the Disability Debrief. I have enjoyed reading your articles for decades, and believe you that you are making a terrible mistake.

Your rationale to stop publication is that there is no longer a need for a newsletter putting a disability lens on world news because “disabled people no longer face exclusion and stories about disability are now thoroughly covered by mainstream media.”

Yes, that is true, and bravo to you for your success, but you still have a lot of news to cover. What about your obligation to tell the history of disability advocacy to people who might begin to take all this for granted?

I began to subscribe to Disability Debrief in 2025 when I was only 76 years old. For the first time in my life I began to identify with people who had struggled with disabilities all their lives in a society that ignored their needs. I wanted to learn more about them and their fight for change.

Now I’m 101. I truly believe that advocacy for people with disabilities is the reason I can plan for another 50 years on this planet. The success of one group has rippling effects on all humanity.

You have more to write about, my dear editors. You have much to convey to generations who don’t know the history of how disabled people were treated. Continue to tell that story. Continue to inspire other groups to take up their own fights.

Yours faithfully,

Margo

Outro

Stay tuned: We hope to share another open call for writing soon.

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For more from Kinanty, see her website.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those who shared submissions for the call for writing: it was an honour to read them and feel the emotion of relief of our rights becoming real.

Thanks and congratulations to those we published here: maitreya, Bill, Jamie, Han, Alan, and Margo.

Thanks to Kinanty Andini for the gorgeous illustration of 2050. And do compare and contrast with the illustration she did when we shared the call.

Thanks to Celestine Fraser who designed the call for writing, and worked to shortlist and select the favourite pieces.

And thanks to the readers and organisations whose support of the Debrief makes this work possible.