My work is often about making a case for weakness and dependency in a strength and health-obsessed society.  If I had to gather all my notes and essays and photographs and videos and drawings and collages, I think I would title them collectively Carried & Held.  I feel so lucky to have been handled so gently thus far. 
One of the first pieces I wanted to complete but never did was tracing the lines of a crumpled piece of paper. 
I wear a silver ring on the middle finger of my left hand because one summer I noticed a boy - maybe 8 or 9 years old - wearing the same accessory at a raptor show in Franklin, NY or thereabouts.
One of my first crisis of artistic reasoning and content was brought on and encouraged by McArthur Freeman after I was caught hook, line, and sinker in my art department's version of transcendent forms, processes, and expressions.  McArthur kept asking me why I was doing what I was doing and his inquiries were so confusing and off-putting because I had no answers.  This was, obviously, an invaluable experience.
My second crisis, though really not so dramatic as to call it a crisis, came after moving to Miami, FL and meeting Kathleen Hudspeth.  From her I learned the benefits of occasionally suspending sincerity and about the expansive possibilities of material as related to content.  I learned to fall in love again with metaphor after swearing it off in search of isolating the thing that a metaphor surrounds.  Kathleen introduced me to the work of Adrian Piper and her "Joy of Marginality" inside Out or Order, Out of Sight, Volumes I and II.  Kathleen helped me realize my thinking has been influenced by rigid ideas of genius, success, and myths of originality. 
I started spending a lot of time reading the work of Terrance Hayes and worried a lot less about the fact that I was in art school but mostly wanted to write poems and autobiographical essays.  I adapted some things for short videos and used my first experience living completely alone as a studio.
My anxiety about how not to delineate or hierarchically justify my time spent writing and my time working on non-verbal images lessened and I graduated with an MFA, connoting some kind of mastery.  I attended my first residency in Saugatuck, MI.  Among many important conversations with many people, I tell Ben Fain I am uncertain of the fact that my work is always read in relation to my life with a degenerative neuromuscular disease.  He says "you'd be a fool not to use it."
In a collaborative project, Mike Wolf writes "beneath this feeling, another feeling."
I'll move to New York soon and still I question and think often about the use and usefulness of my work as an artist, the immense privileges of my life.  Sunaura Taylor has written an essay entitled "The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability."  I aim to track down a copy.