How ‘crip time’ changed how I work online

When I think about my disability it’s often impossible to not think about the concept of time along with it. I will forever be hyper aware of how much time I have to button my shirt before my only remaining hand cramps up or how my travel time is nearly doubled if I’m carrying a tripod and can’t open doors along my route. My mind will never shy at the opportunity to conjure up what could’ve been had cancer not derailed my able-bodied dreams, and with it, my ability to neatly adhere to a normative sense of time. 

“Normative time can be defined as the broadly socially accepted way that time in everyday life is divided,” according to writer Tamar LeRoy. It’s the five day work week that I clung to – often at the expense of my own health, it’s the allotted test time in college that never felt long enough to write 500 words with one hand, and it’s the influencer industry standards like “deliverables are due seven days from receipt of product,” which always felt like a Herculean task as someone with a disability and two jobs. 

When I decided to try my hand at content creation in 2020, I did so without fully grasping that I’d be ingratiating myself to an algorithm that would not understand my need for breaks. I hadn’t considered that I’d be vying for the attention of brands who, historically, hadn’t had diversity and inclusion front of mind and therefore didn’t have it built into their influencer marketing approach. Three years in and I’m now realizing that the rhythm of influencer marketing is too fast and out of tune when it comes to my disabled body. Crip Time – a term coined by academic Alison Kafer that describes the unique ways disabled and chronically ill people experience time compared to able-bodied folk – has given me a new framework to understand, reassess and approach my work online. 

“Crip Time – a term that describes the unique ways disabled and chronically ill people experience time compared to able-bodied folk – has given me a new framework to understand, reassess and approach my work online.”

When I first heard the term, it was finally an explanation for the incessant feeling that I was always behind the ball when it came to acing the formula for online success. At the beginning, I voraciously watched the videos and read the articles that staunchly recommended that I batch shoot content, show up online everyday, and do whatever was necessary to curry favor with the brands I wanted to work with. I faulted myself for not being able to get through a batch shoot day carrying camera equipment and changes of clothes up flights of stairs and I struggled especially with the latter as I blew through hundreds of dollars altering gifted clothes to fit me without my prosthetic. I was exhausted from trying to post everyday, blowing my budget every month and, overall, beginning not to recognize myself or my mission in creating content in the first place; creating the disabled representation I wish I had. 

Through the lens of Crip Time, I started to confront how inaccessible the influencer path is. Quick turnarounds and inflexible deadlines ignore the fact that disability and chronic illness consume your energy and time often without notice. I’d get my deliverables to the influencer manager within a week but I’d sacrifice doing chores, errands or hanging out with friends in order to rest after my mad dash. Creative briefs that prohibited sitting or required me use both hands to open and test out products meant it took me longer to shoot content to begin with. 

I began to appreciate that the hours in my day would never resemble the day of an able-bodied content creator, and therefore I felt emboldened to ask that my clock be taken into consideration. I asked for longer deadlines so I could account for bad pain days and the time it took to get clothes altered – along with asking brands to cover the tailoring. I asked that the creative briefs include people with disabilities and accessible shoot concepts. I often see my engagement tank whenever I decide to rest and take a break from posting, but in exchange I’ve been able to spend more time with myself and my loved ones. 

Crip Time also helped me contend with feelings of displacement and alienation from life’s milestones. From normative time we get cultural expectations that if mapped out resemble the milestones on a game of Life board— dictating when certain life events should happen and for what period of time. Like at what age you should get married or have kids, when you should graduate from high school or college, move out of your parent’s house or be fully immersed in a successful career. As someone who didn’t graduate college until I was 26, lived at home off and on until I was 28, who will lose her health insurance if she gets married and who is still very much at the shallow end of a successful career, these expectations left me feeling shameful, worthless, and like I would be perpetually late in meeting life’s milestones, if I got there at all. Crip Time gave me a language to understand my timeline, my alternate path and begin to make peace with it, even celebrate it online. 

Crip time calls out normative time as artificial, something that can and should be adjusted. The influencer marketplace can and should be more accessible and inclusive. As disability theorist Alison Kafer describes it: rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

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