We believe that our power for change is important. We chose "We've Learned a Lot" as the title of our work because we believe in the transformative power of learning. We were empowered by each other. We were affirmed that our strategies for coping with lire in a disabling society are rich and powerful resources.

Gail Christie writes about her experience of being part of the Collective: “I always appreciated that I could write however and whatever I wanted from my own experience. It was most freeing! The level of deep sharing when we came together was immediate and amazing. I think that was helped to happen by the fact that we had read each others' material ahead of time. As well, we all live with a disability of some kind and barriers and masks were unnecessary. We did not get caught up in the differences of our disabilities. We were simply women sharing what it is like to live with disability. We all learned and we enjoyed the learning."

It is challenging to work collectively. Our mix of disabilities and chronic illnesses, spiritual practices, ages, urban and rural lives, relationship circumstances, employment-to-full-time-health-care continuum and the fact that not all of us knew each other before the consultation meant we had to spend some time building community and discovering who each other is. Our needs differ from each other and from what is expected in society. For example, as we met it was very hot. We needed to adapt to the heat because one member of the Collective lives with severe hearing impairment and the room's air conditioner was too noisy to use.

A second example comes as we seek a publisher. The publisher who originally expressed interest has turned clown the book partly because of the diverse styles of writing. In putting the book together, we recognized that women with disabilities and chronic illnesses have different abilities. For some, reading prose text is difficult so poetry, liturgies and dialogue are included. For others, theory helps understanding; still for others, shared experience is most useful. Some want or need sections read aloud and thus we have used subheadings to divide longer pieces into manageable parts. While the resulting mixed media of the book may be distracting for some readers (or publishers), we think it is symbolic of the real differences in our needs as women living with disabilities and chronic illnesses.

Making Meaning

Some of the Barb Wire Collective are part of Christian churches; others have different spiritual expressions. We chose to define spirituality broadly. Making meaning out of the experiences of our lives is what we call spiritual.

Central to this activity of making meaning is knowing that our lives have value. As we prepared this article, Mary Elford wrote, "All people have some sort of disability, but some know their disability and how best to live with it, while others don't. Therefore, people with disabilities cannot be lumped together and treated homogeneously. We need first to see the person, and not the disability, and hear the person as she is able to name her own needs."