YOUâRE LOOKING
AT THE WRONG PARTS đ
I sometimes wonder what people imagine is going on inside the life of someone with a visible disability.
I walk very strangely. My left arm doesnât work at all. My hand is contracted into a claw. I do everything one-handed, and that clearly wasnât covered in this modelâs original operating instructions.
From the outside, I suspect it can look like a life dominated by disability.
âPoor bugger.â âWhat a tragedy.â âEverything must be so difficult?â
Meanwhile, inside my actual life, Iâm usually wondering whether the coffee is ready, what ridiculous thing I can write on Mastodon, whether the dogs have been fed, or why everyone on the internet has suddenly gone mad again.
The disability is there, obviously. I cannot drive, and there are many things I cannot do unaided. Other things just take longer, because much of the world appears to have been designed by someone who assumed every human comes with two fully operational hands.
And most people are remarkably unhelpful.
That sounds like a complaint, but it has an unexpected benefit. If youâre disabled, you become bloody good at finding another way. You have to.
Eventually, you stop wondering how something is supposed to be done and work out how you can do it.
That doesnât make accessibility unnecessary. Quite the opposite. But disabled people often become extremely skilled at adapting because the world gives us plenty of practice.
Disability is not the central event of my consciousness.
I donât wake up thinking, âGood morning. I am disabled.â
I wake up thinking, âCoffee.â
Most of the time, Iâm not experiencing myself as a tragic medical story. Iâm just living.
Iâve had decades to become extremely competent at being this particular slightly damaged model of human being. Sometimes other people seem considerably more concerned about my disability than I am.
Itâs sweet.
But unnecessary.
The odd thing about a visible disability is that people often see what doesnât work before they notice the enormous amount that does.
And from inside here?
Itâs mostly just Friday.
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