Disabled people do not owe you their entire, often traumatic medical history, especially if you’re a stranger on the bus or waiting behind one of us in a shop queue . We are not broken and don’t need fixing so stop asking acquaintances and passers by what’s wrong with you? That repeated question from people I barely knew chipped away at the bones of my self esteem for years. When you are told your existence is wrong you start to believe that it is inherently wrong.
Many non disabled people assume the hardest part of being disabled is the disability itself. In reality it’s society’s twisted and archaic view of disability. The othering, the piercing stares, the way we are infantilised in the media and trodden on by the government. We do not wheel down the the street to be your educational disability encyclopaedia, read, and learn from the life’s work of pioneering disability advocates who decided to become educators. You can’t make history in grand halls you cannot enter, Oxbridge isn’t a option when you have been physical barred from even dreaming of it. It’s jarring when the historic steps of grade two listed buildings matter more to elite society than whether we can enter them.
Stop asking us what’s wrong with you and start examining!
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