It was relatively easy to land on “Reimagining the Good Life” as my new tagline and the new title of my podcast. Those words helped pull together what I’ve been working through for decades. They were clear without being too concrete. They were intriguing without being too obscure.

But then came the question of whether to say anything more than that. In the past, I didn’t have a tagline. I just used my name and then some combination of “Faith, family, disability, and culture” as a way to describe the Venn diagram of topics I might cover. I needed to decide whether any or all of those terms should carry over into this new iteration of describing my work.

We landed on Disability. Faith. Culture.

The experience of disability has been my invitation into the work of reimagining the good life, so that word comes first. I used to be afraid that if I concentrated too much on disability, I would run out of things to say. Eighteen years into this life, however, I’ve found an endless series of things to learn and topics to consider and ways to reflect. Reimagining the good life through the lens of disability is here to stay.

That said, I also incorporate the lens of faith—implicitly or explicitly—in pretty much everything I do, so we wanted to include that as well. I didn’t want readers to have any sense of a “bait and switch,” though I also very much hope that readers who don’t share my Christian faith will always feel my writing is welcoming and accessible. Still, the way of Jesus has shaped and formed my understanding of the three things I hope to accomplish in this space, and I wanted to be clear about the way faith anchors my commitment to challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human, and envisioning a world of belonging.

And then there’s the word culture. It’s broad enough to mean nothing. Within this list, it really just means that I want all of this writing to be relevant to our actual daily lives within this time and place. Whether it’s looking at a movie like Barbie through the lens of disability, or wondering why Taylor Swift has such a huge following, or considering the way doctors deliver a diagnosis of Down syndrome—I want the work I do to connect to our lived experiences.

I wrote in my book Small Talk that “limitations, properly understood, lead to love.” Placing these limits on my writing work has not led to love, exactly, but the limits have led to a sense of freedom. They give me a filter for which topics to pursue, which books to read, which podcast guests to interview, and how to imagine a good future for the little corner of the internet I inhabit.

Creating this definition has given me clarity on courses I want to teach (information about the first workshop, in May, called Reimagining Family Life with Disability, coming soon), talks and essays I want to write, and books I hope to create.

MORE WITH AMY JULIA:

• Reimagining the Good Life. Disability. Faith. Culture.
• Reimagining the Good Life Podcast
• It’s Always Too Much | Four Thousand Weeks

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