What Disabled People Wish Everyone Knew
How much should you know about being disabled? If you don’t have a disability yourself, or have a parent, brother, sister, relative, friend or neighbour who is disabled, then how much can you really know about what it feels like to live with a disability?
Here are a few things that everyone with a disability wished that everyone else knew:
- Disabilities of all kinds exist and can’t be compared in terms of “better” or “worse”
There are all kinds of specific physical conditions such as fibromyalgia CBD that can occur and the term “disability” can cover a wide range of specific conditions. Each situation is unique and requires a unique approach to dealing with the disability. Each disability can produce its own set of physical difficulties, medical needs and mental hardships as well as social stigmas and hurdles that must be faced in daily life.
- People with a disability deserve to be treated with respect
People with disabilities have special needs including walking canes, wheel chairs, walkers, homes and communities attuned to their special needs. Some people will also require personal assistance to aid in tasks and self-care. Special adaptive devices are needed by deaf, blind, hearing impaired and non-speaking people. These people also need the patience, respect and understanding that they will need to navigate the world with confidence. This comes from everyone treating the disabled with respect.
- Disabilities can be hard, but they aren’t always terrible.
The hardships experienced by most disabled people will be directly and indirectly related to their disabilities. Most disabled people will say that the majority of their hardships come from other people and the environments in which they live rather than the disabilities they are actually suffering.
This can be considered in a pie chart. There are different times when the ratio between the suffering experienced from the disability and the suffering experienced from systemic issues, the ableism of other people and the lack of accessibility is different. So, some days it may be the chronic back spasm, the loss of mobility or other physical discomforts are not as bad as the difficulties in getting where we need to go while suffering the insensitivity and able-ist attitudes of other people.
- Some disabled are fortunate to benefit from privilege, others not so much.
The disabled character in the popular TV series “Game of Thrones” says it perfectly when he says, “It is better to be a rich cripple, if you will be a cripple.” He also acknowledges the many benefits he enjoyed being born into nobility that he would never have enjoyed had he been born to an average family. |Disabled people will have a wide range of experiences, but there are great inequalities that can have a huge effect on the way a disabled person lives from day to day
- The desire to be seen, heard, and taken seriously.
A disabled person faces complex struggles when dealing with visibility. One of the great contradictions of living with living with a disability is that even though the disability is impossible to miss, the disabled person finds themselves feeling invisible. This causes many disabled people to work twice as hard to keep up and sideline the disability to be accepted. But deep down inside we have a deep need and longing to be acknowledged as people just like all others, with distinct disabilities.