On Shame, Pride, & Disability: Thoughts on Disability Pride Month 2023
A lot of the time, it’s hard to feel truly proud of my disabilities. At best, I usually feel more neutral about my disabilities, aside from my passion for disability rights. However, I do still feel "disability pride" in my own way. It mostly comes to me through the resistance of shame and internalized ableism. For a long time, this was not possible for me to do. I did feel a lot of shame and internalized ableism. I didn’t know it was possible for me to feel anything else. Sometimes I felt shame about my disabilities without even realizing that was what I was feeling, or having the language to describe it. I also felt shame about things I didn’t realize were disabilities, things I thought were character flaws before my ADHD diagnosis. Even when I felt shame about my lack of energy, my need for rest, my inability to cope with pain, I didn’t realize I was feeling shame for things related to disability, I thought they were just things that were “wrong” with me. When I started seeing content on social media that told me I didn’t have to feel shame and taught me different narratives around disability, that’s when things started to change. I learned about ableism, how everyone internalizes it and we need to work on unlearning it, and I learned that ableism was to blame for a lot of what I was feeling. Learning about disability and ableism is how I started to heal from the damage ableism had done.
Just a few lessons I learned:
Your worth is not tied to your productivity. That is an ableist, capitalist idea that needs to die already.
There’s nothing wrong with being mentally ill, and people who perpetuate the idea that mentally ill people are bad or evil are the ones who should feel bad, not me.
A lot of people have the same disabilities that I have. A lot of people struggle with mental health. Many of them just don’t talk about it much because of the stigma.
Rest is good. Not having energy to do things is okay. Needing rest and not having energy are not things I need to feel ashamed about.
People who aren’t overtly ableist will accept you. Overtly ableist people are not worth your time.
People who cling to ableism are screwing themselves over, because they will likely end up with a disability sooner or later.
A lot of the anger, sadness, and shame I feel is due to ableism I have witnessed.
Learning about ableism has helped me more than I ever could have imagined. I have been lucky enough to learn some of what I know from a degree program in Disability Studies. But I have also learned so much from books, documentaries, online media, and social media posts all from other disabled people.
Another aspect of disability pride is rejecting the idea that disability makes anyone a burden. This means trying your best to resist feeling like a burden yourself when your disability means you need help. All humans need help sometimes - it is ableism that makes us think certain people are burdens for needing help. This one can be hard. We have to forgive ourselves for struggling to not feel like burdens, just as we have to forgive ourselves for needing help.
Disability pride has to involve embracing the complexity of disability. We don't all have the same experiences. Some of what I have written here may not apply to you and that's okay. I don't relate to every memoir I read on disability and that's okay. All of our experiences are important, but they are not all the same. The complexity also means there are negative aspects of disability and some people will experience more of those negative aspects for a variety of reasons. The negative aspects can include chronic pain, health issues, lack of access, lack of support services, other forms of oppression intersecting with ableism, and so on. We can't turn disability pride into capitalist inspiration porn. Disability does not always involve good experiences, and disability pride should not mean we can't talk about those.
I feel "pride" when I reject the shame I have been taught to feel by our ableist society. I feel it when I engage with disability culture, advocate for accessibility and disability rights, and talk to other disabled people about our experiences. It doesn't have to be about glossing over our experiences and making them sound more "positive" or "inspirational." There is joy and pride and there is sadness, grief, injustice, anger in disability the same way there is in any other part of life. Disability Pride month may mostly focus on the positive, the joy, the pride but that is because the world wants to focus on disability as a negative, pitiful experience - a shameful one, even. With each disability pride month, I wish the world would begin to realize disabled people have no reason to be ashamed, but anyone who embraces the hatred of disabled people should.