Learning the Camino Real—Disability and the Desert

This essay is about a writer with X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH), a genetic illness that causes limited mobility, who moves to the Chihuahuan Desert with her newborn child, who has just been released from the NICU. The essay focuses on how the desert environment presents both challenges and rewarding insights into living with disability. The desert can be pitiless but is also an equalizer, showing the truth (affirmed by disability culture) that we are all vulnerable and interconnected. The author comes to embrace the desert as a landscape that provides a reconciliation with disability and recognition of the value of liminal space, revealing the multiplicity of disability and its range of human perspectives.