Perhaps disability studies’ most significant knowledge claim is that disability is everywhere, once you know how to look for it. The works collected in this issue of Manual are witnesses to this claim. Variance draws from the abundant cultural archive, affirming the universal presence and persistence of disability as a human experience across the ages.

The human variations that we think of as disabilities in the broadest sense occur in every life and family and are a theme in all art and culture. Because these variances endure in human lived experience, we’ve recorded them as a set of stories that we receive, make, and remake over time and across place throughout human history. We might say that disability itself is a story, a record written on the body of flesh encountering world. Disability is a material phenomenon, but it is also a narrative occasion. How we acquire, experience, and live out our disabilities is a story prompt we answer with words, sounds, images, and objects—all of the story-making tools of human culture.

In our modern era, scientific medicine has taken interpretive control over many of the older stories we made about the human variations, these body-mind differences. Yet there is a residue of stories beyond disease, pathology, diagnosis, and prognosis that is available to us through the arts. We witness disability stories from across all genres, media, time periods, aesthetic themes, and cultures. The lived experiences of disability are opportunities for expression, creativity, imagination, relationships, and flourishing.

People with disabilities are the unexpected made flesh. The challenges of living in a world not built for us are occasions for resourcefulness and adaptability, especially for those of us who start out in this position early in life. We are innovators, early adopters, expert users, and technology hackers as we respond to the adversity the built and natural environments present us.

By showing us disability across time and place, Variance tells us something important about living lives with disabilities. This stunning diversity of humanity, these distinctive ways of being that a lived life yields, are not necessarily an occasion for despair.

The usual stories about disability teach us that disability is the exception when in fact it is the rule. All of us will become disabled if we live long enough. The human variations we think of as illness and disability come to all of us over a lifetime, shaping our bodies, lives, families, and communities quite literally. Because we live in—because we are—beings made of flesh, blood, and bone, we are inherently vulnerable to encounters that will shape and reshape our bodies as we move through life and world in the process we think of as development or as a lived life. Disabilities and living with our disabilities, then, are fundamental to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt calls “the human condition.”