Disability Power

What is a disability? What does it mean? What even qualifies?

According to Equality Act 2010, you have a disability if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

I’ve lived up to that definition since I was 15-years-old but it’s only within the last year that I’ve embraced the word. I ran away from it when high school, college and university advisors pushed me to access disability support. Even after finishing university, I kept rejecting the word; it felt like it didn’t belong to me because all my conditions were ‘invisible’.

I still don’t fully understand why I kept shying away from it. My gut instinct kept telling me to deny it, so I did. The word felt alien and my fear of what having a disability could mean for my future convinced me to keep resisting.

The root of my wariness came from a distrust of the word itself. Everything I had been taught about being disabled made me want to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. In my mind, the word was reserved for people in wheelchairs and other mobility devices, not for people with chronic illnesses. Society taught me that disabled people fit a very specific mould, so when I began getting sick the notion of being disabled never cropped up.

Later, when my pastoral support at high school encouraged me to get assistance in managing the conditions, I pushed back. I thought that I could just clench my fists and get on with it. How was reaching out for outside support going to help me?

My understanding of disability at that age was, to put it simply, ugly and wrong. I thought being disabled was something to pity, to desperately avoid. The only disabilities I had seen in real-life, or on TV, were paralysed men and women, or people with amputated limbs, or the deaf children my mum taught.

This limited scope of disability convinced me that I was unworthy of the word. How could I fit into that category? I believed that I had to be visibly disabled in order to qualify.

From the outside, I look like an able-bodied person but on the inside my body is falling apart. Through my own experiences, I’ve finally learned that disabilities do not have a uniform appearance. We come in countless beautiful shapes and sizes, some immediately obvious and others completely invisible. I just wish I hadn’t taken so long to come to that startlingly obvious conclusion.

In order to protect my body from further harm, I have had to tackle my disabilities head on. The first step has been accepting that I am disabled! I used to force myself up flights of stairs because I was too embarrassed to ask my friends to take the lift. I would push myself through long nights out so I didn’t have to be the one who made everyone go home early. I avoided doing my physiotherapy, refused medical help and convinced myself that I was perfectly healthy. No more of that silliness!

Pushing myself through the pain appeared to work until my health tanked in 2017. It was the worst health year I’ve ever had and 2018 hasn’t been great either. I believe I’m paying for the years I pushed my body too far and now my illnesses, both of which are progressive, are fighting back. So I have had to adjust my entire life to minimise the damage I’ve been doing for years. Just by accepting the word into my vocabulary, I feel like I’m finally ready to take proper care of myself.

I used to be one of the many people who associate disability with weakness; I truly believed it was something to be pitied. Now I know just how much strength lies in disabled people because living with physical or mental limitations is far from weak, it’s really fucking fierce. It takes immense patience and power to endure. While being disabled will never define me, it’s now a word that I will wear as a mark of pride for the rest of my life.