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Disabled people often have full clarity about how the world sees disabled people and disability. If a disabled person ever tells you that the world wants them dead, the only acceptable response is to acknowledge that this is true.
We constantly get the message “Better dead than disabled.” The only response that affirms a disabled person’s experience and intelligence is to confirm that this is the message they are given everywhere, every day, by the world, and tell them that this message is wrong.
This message is rooted in ableism from a world not built for them, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be alive. These systems of thought are wrong, and that unlearning them and finding our own way out from under the expectation of death is gruelling and exhausting.
The important message is that the this understanding of disability is wrong and we can find different ways of being in the world together. Ways that honour our collective ways of being and valuing. That there is something worthy in the act of living itself.
I worry a lot about the folks who never get to hear that message. Who get stuck and give up before they get to hear it. I’m terrified about the ways that #BillC7 makes it even easier for someone to never get the chance to unlearn everything they know about disability. #KillBillC7
People deserve time and opportunities to unlearn these harmful messages with love, patience and compassion. They deserve strong disabled role models who don’t give in to overcoming narratives. The ones who don’t hide how hard this world can be, or how amazing.
They deserve disabled people, living fully, as exactly themselves. Making more space for everyone to live that way too. What would be so terrible about that? What would be so terrible if we lived? Learned? Thrived? Adapted? What makes death better than that?
