True or Not? Adaptation – A Quiet Line Through Time

I keep returning to this portrait. A woman seated in a wicker wheelchair, crutches resting across her lap, her hat trimmed with flowers, her posture composed. She looks straight into the camera with a steadiness that feels familiar.

I imagine her life in the Victorian or Edwardian years, a time when disability had no language of rights, no accommodations, no understanding beyond charity or pity. If she wanted to work, she adapted. If she wanted to move through the world, she adapted. If she wanted to create, she adapted. Quietly, without recognition, without support, without the words we have now.

Maybe she altered her tools so her hands could manage them. Maybe she slowed her pace because her body demanded it. Maybe she worked from home because the world outside wasn’t built for her. Maybe she learned to hide her pain because there was no space to speak of it.

Adaptation wasn’t a choice for her. It was survival.

And yet, there is dignity in her gaze, a sense of someone who has shaped her life around the realities of her body, not in defeat but in determination. She is not fragile. She is resourceful.

When I look at her, I see the long thread of adaptation stretching forward into my own life. I work differently because I must. I change my tools, my pace, my environment. I listen to my body even when the world doesn’t. I make things in ways that make sense to me, not to the expectations around me.

The difference is that I have language she never had. I have community she never knew. I have the right to say: this is what I need.

But the core of it, the quiet, practical reshaping of life around a body that doesn’t follow the rules, that hasn’t changed.

Adaptation is not a weakness. It is a craft. It is a lineage. It is a way of surviving and still making something of your own.

When I adapt today, I feel like I’m echoing her, not copying her struggle, but honouring the ingenuity that disabled people have always carried. The work changes, the tools change, the world changes, but the thread remains.

Adaptation is the story beneath so many stories. It always has been.