Kalliope
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Spotted this on twitter today and warmly recommend it!
It took me a while to realize that the way I saw myself and the way I was treated was directly caused by the harmful cultural stories we tell about injury and disability and health and accommodation and value. Those wrong maps are the ones that help us navigate what to do when a friend who looks fine cancels on us at the last minute or isn’t able to listen to us when we’re in crisis.
We don’t have stories that tell us how that friend’s disabilities might be intermittent, invisible, and unpredictable and how frightening it is to live in a body like that. How much someone living in such a body might need extra kindness and care and not less. We don’t have stories that tell us that disability isn’t something that we can visibly see – that things like pain, brain fog, and fatigue can exist beneath a nice outfit and a smile. We don’t have stories that say that we need to believe people when they tell us they are unwell. Instead, we have discourses that say that disabled people are often fakers -- we are trained to bring doubt instead of empathy to our encounters with disabled bodies.
It took me a while to realize that the way I saw myself and the way I was treated was directly caused by the harmful cultural stories we tell about injury and disability and health and accommodation and value. Those wrong maps are the ones that help us navigate what to do when a friend who looks fine cancels on us at the last minute or isn’t able to listen to us when we’re in crisis.
We don’t have stories that tell us how that friend’s disabilities might be intermittent, invisible, and unpredictable and how frightening it is to live in a body like that. How much someone living in such a body might need extra kindness and care and not less. We don’t have stories that tell us that disability isn’t something that we can visibly see – that things like pain, brain fog, and fatigue can exist beneath a nice outfit and a smile. We don’t have stories that say that we need to believe people when they tell us they are unwell. Instead, we have discourses that say that disabled people are often fakers -- we are trained to bring doubt instead of empathy to our encounters with disabled bodies.