Blogging Against Disablism Day, 2009

I’ve struggled with what to write for this post.

I’ve thought about writing about the shared identity I have as the daughter of a woman with a physical disability: how I learned growing up first to look for seats and benches everywhere, before she got her chair, then later to scan ahead for ramps and wide enough doors and spaces to maneuver; how I felt when I overheard adults who should have known better say she wasn’t disabled, she was just fat and lazy; how the Boychick has learned to love electric carts and thinks everyone in one is a grandparent just waiting to take him on a ride.

I’ve thought about writing more about my struggles with bipolar disorder, maybe finish up part three of the mental health series I’ve been promising for a while: maybe tell the story of ruining Christmas three years running, anxiety attacks coming out in force with the rising chorus of Christmas carols; maybe the one where I was overwhelmed by the crush of crowds, and had to be lead through IKEA like a woman without sight, because I could see too much, and ended up hiding in an empty slot in the warehouse, exactly like a scared animal because that’s all I was, until the crowds and the panic thinned and I could escape; or perhaps tell you about the probably-concussion I suffered when the self-soothing head-on-wall went a little too far, undiagnosed because it was beyond me even to contemplate an explanation when merely existing in my skin was too hard already.

I’ve thought about getting on my high horse, pulling out my pompous thesaurus, hiding behind a wall of intellectualism, and lecturing about the Evils of Disablism and the Privilege of the Abled — with just enough self-disclosure and self-flagellation to not lose all your interest, I’d hope.

And I’ve thought again and again about abandoning the idea of writing about it at all, because it feels like so much hubris, because I’m not ill enough not disabled enough not crazy enough to be worthy of writing about disablism — and you likely have to be at least as crazy as I am, or love someone who is, to recognize the insanity in that declaration of being too-sane.

That last one is true, in a way; my illness is invisible: my body is not twisted as my mind is, my crutches are hidden as behavioral quirks, not strapped to my arms, and though I walk through life with a devil riding me, my body’s back is unbowed. More, too, for I am — and this is I will admit a relative comparison — basically sane at the moment, mostly functional in my daily life, able to do normal(ish) things in a normal(ish) way.

Which is all to say, I do not suffer daily disablism the way so many do: insults do not get hurled at me regularly; my basic worth and competence and humanity are not questioned or outright dismissed by those around me. I pass, for sane, for able, for “normal”.

But I’m not. I infiltrate. I am quiet, unseen. And so I hear what is said.

I hear bipolar/postpartum depression/post traumatic stress disorder/social anxiety dismissed as a quack diagnosis. I hear fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue syndrome belittled as so much whinging. I hear the jokes about chill pills and happy pills and pill-popping, always implying the joke’s subject takes too many or doesn’t take enough. I hear the tuts of tongues saying well she’s too ill to deserve children, they should take them away and tie her tubes. I hear the perky voices proclaiming it could all be better with positive thinking. I hear the declarations of her as incurable, him soulless. I hear the never-ending refrains of it’s not that bad, just stay home, just go out, just be normal, just don’t be like that, just don’t be you.

I hear it all, and it hurts me all. Sometimes I speak up, and sometimes I don’t; sometimes I let the pain show, and sometimes I don’t; sometimes I out myself and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I have the strength, the energy, the reserves, the coping ability, the buffer. Sometimes I don’t.

I’ve been called names, dismissed to my face, asked to do too much, told I’m not doing enough. But it is in my invisibility, my passing, that I am most affected by (dis)ablism; it is the side comments, the snide comments, the jokes and the jabs about “them” that are really about me and mine, that I suffer from most frequently.

You may not see me when we are out in the world together, may not see my diagnosis, see my illness, see my allegiance to the tribe of the disabled — but I see you. And I hear you. And I remember.