Disability Status Shouldn’t Have a Hierarchy
While someone’s disability may not be evident to you, it still affects their life—and how they’re treated within and outside the disability community.
While someone’s disability may not be evident to you, it still affects their life—and how they’re treated within and outside the disability community.
We speak of the radicalization of disabled people, but so few have that experience. So many never even know us.
What’s terrifying about Spears’s situation, for a certain kind of disabled person, is that we are a razor’s edge away from joining her.
It upsets cure evangelists to see evidence of disability, right there in front of them.
Beds transmute into a form of policing while simultaneously being promoted as an alternative to policing.
In listings for old pottery that was not intended to be crazed, sellers will disclose what they see as damage: ‘Some crazing.’ Sometimes that’s how I feel. Some crazing.
There are entire lines of therapy that basically boil down to “learn self-control so you never upset the sane.”
Everyone’s experience of a diagnosis is different. Here is mine: A key opens a lock I didn’t know existed, sending a door swinging wide.
When you attribute someone’s evil actions to their mental health status rather than their actual root cause—like white supremacy—then that evil is no longer presented as a choice.
Disability ruins everything, these stories tell us: disability itself is tragedy. These people’s lives are over, apparently, even though they are palpably still here.
It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to spend a lifetime being told that you are not allowed. Not always in so many words, but in gestures, in spaces, in thoughtlessness.
When your back is against the wall, dumping your loved ones in the president’s front yard can seem like the only rational response.
You will remember, in fact, the first doctor who does ask, who says ‘is it okay if I put my hands here,’ gesturing, waiting for you to say ‘yes.’
Here’s a thing about being labeled “smart” as a kid: When there’s a thing you’re not good at, people assume it is because you are lazy.
Experiencing a severe reaction to medication taught me many interesting things about the limits of my own body, but also the limits of the world around me.
Those who spend their lives in bodies others deem unworthy grow accustomed to building our own self-worth.
It is not so much that these things are invisible as it is that people are trained to hide them, and society is conditioned to look away from them.
Disability is not wrong or tragic or bad, but sometimes it is a symptom of a grave injustice.
How can I say that I fear I’ll never date again without feeding the monster? No one owes me their touch; I am starving for it just the same.
It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space, but actively owning it.