Yesterday I wrote a long thread about how I keep seeing able bodied cultural leaders asking for specifically *visibly* disabled artists/workers/representation.
I wrote about how “invisible disability” is a misleading headline phrase...

...designed to encourage people to remember that disability doesn’t look one way, but truthfully every disability is “visible” at the end of the day, because you can see it’s effects in a huge variety of highly visible ways.

And that this kind of request really just means “visible to *me*, an able bodied person with an able bodied understanding, so I can decide what counts”

And how that’s just adding to an able bodied view of the world and keeping representation and thus understanding of disability limited. That the optics vs material reality vs assumed needs triangle is nuanced, and I wish people would ask more.

But then I realised what was under it all was really me feeling vulnerable and unseen and tired, and weary of worsening my health for an industry where it then doesn’t even seem to count. (Not that this is accurate - it’s a feeling, not a fact, felt in a moment. It’s all allowed)

And ultimately twitter can’t hold those things, least of all feelings, & definitely isn’t the place for a nuanced, detailed discussion about the above.

So instead I’m posting this meta-thread, about the unsaid things. Which is a lot when it comes to disability.
Mine specifically.

Articulation is hard.

Advocating for yourself is hard. Especially when you are the leader in a room.

And a basic plea to really interrogate what you mean when you ask for *only* the “visible”. I’m gonna assume the intention is good, but it might be time to either think more expansively, or speak more precisely.

Or both.