Saturday 8 May 2010

Disabled? fuck off.

I hate being considered disabled. This is self-stigmatic. This is pride.
This is also an observation of the ideal of the social model of disability: I'm not disabled. Society is.

This applies beyond mental health. A person in a wheel chair is not disabled. Create lifts and ramps and adapt society and the 'disability' reduces. Get amazing engineers to design automatic limbs and advanced, all terrain wheel chairs then the 'disability' lessens further. Change people to see a person in a wheel chair as no different from a person without and the disability disappears. However in a disabled society, a society maladapted to the diversity of the human race, a person in a wheel chair looks like they are disabled.

A person in a wheel chair is equal to a person without. A person without
experience of mental illness is equal to a person who has the experience, no matter what I usually say. If society - the people and the organisations - don't understand that then that's their fucking disability.

It's great to have a law that forces people to act like they understand that and the Disability Discrimination Act is reasonably good for a piece of paper but the real discrimination happens outside the legal system. It also asks a person say they are disabled when they aren't.

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About Me

We It comes in part from an appreciation that no one can truly sign their own work. Everything is many influences coming together to the one moment where a work exists. The other is a begrudging acceptance that my work was never my own. There is another consciousness or non-corporeal entity that helps and harms me in everything I do. I am not I because of this force or entity. I am "we"