I didn’t know until years later that Prince did the same damn thing. Prince had epilepsy, too. Prince got freaky as survival strategy.
In 2009, he talked about his epilepsy publicly for the first time on PBS with Tavis Smiley. “From that point on,” he said, “I’ve been having to deal with a lot of things, getting teased a lot in school. And early in my career I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I could.”
Prince was a walking disability poetics.
After that, when I listened to his music, I thought: Prince has a Sparkle Brain.
Prince and the Sparkle Brains (cw: disability, ableism, sexual abuse) – Karrie higgins
Sparkle Brain. My term for my Epileptic, Bipolar, Chiarian, PTSD-brain–for any neurodivergent brain. Sparkle Brain is big tent. Autistic brains are sparkly. Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizure brains are sparkly. Sensory disordered brains are sparkly. Neurodiversity in all its forms is sparkly.
I mean sparkle literally: my brain is extra electric. When my brain lights up, it sparkles like it’s 1999.
But I mean it figuratively, too: sparkly, like a disco ball. A Sparkle Brain is shiny. A Sparkle Brain is beautiful.
Sparkle Brain is my fuck you to neurologists who only see me as broken. My fuck you to editors who want me to cut epilepsy out of my writing because they don’t think it’s relevant, they don’t think it sells, they don’t think it’s sexy. My fuck you to neurotypicals who think I need to be fixed.
Sparkle Brain is Disability Poetics.
Prince and the Sparkle Brains (cw: disability, ableism, sexual abuse) – Karrie higgins
