I've just begun this blog. I decided to move here so as to have a blog more closely connected to disability community specifically.
I have mild cerebral palsy. I will be spending some of my time in this space talking both about my experiences having CP and also about what I think of the ways that we so often get divided into "mild" and "severe" disability.
I'd always rejected a sense of myself as "disabled." I felt that was a word and an identity for other people. I, on the other hand, despite firsthand childhood experience of everything from abuse from helping professionals to pediatric surgery, was one of the almost-normal.
I thought I had to reject disability or make it something "small" about me. But finally as a teenager, I realized that pushing it aside and insisting on the "mildness" of it all meant not talking, and not thinking, about what it meant to actually grow up as I had and to be the person that I am.
So today I reject those labels. Not because I have, or understand, the life experience of someone who needs much more assistive technology or aid from attendants than I ever have, but because how people who are "more disabled" than I am are treated is related to how I am treated too, and dividing us makes no sense. Not only that, but it is based on a hierarchy that says people like me are worth more because we are "less disabled" or "less impaired." And that, in the end, means buying into an ableist way of looking at ourselves as worthwhile only insofar as we resemble nondisabled people.
If we want rights and respect, we have to demand them in a unified way. That means understanding that we are all in this together.
