“Disabled” doesn’t mean “unable”

I’ve been through “disability education” a few times now as part of employment. The most recent time was for my job working at the tutoring center of my university. Someone from The Center for Disability resources came to talk to us about how to work with people with disabilities: what to expect, how to adapt, what not to do.

It was very short, so it couldn’t avoid being lacking. Surprisingly, it covered both visible and invisible disabilities, although not many of them. Those kinds of limitations aside, there was one main problem with the training:

The entire time, the presenter talked as though people with disabilities were an alien species to the people in the audience.

These disabilities included things like wheelchairs, anxiety, and depression. ADHD and learning disabilities. Canes and bipolar disorder. Even if there happened to be no one in the audience with disabilities (which definitely wasn’t true), the language used during the presentation reinforced the awkwardness and separateness that permeates the idea of a disability.

For one thing, mentioning that people in the audience might have a disability normalizes it. That was definitely not achieved by the training I went through. The end of it was particularly awkward for me, because it consisted of my co-workers asking well-intentioned but cringy questions that treated disabled people like an unfathomable enigma.

For another thing, it made the people in the audience who did have disabilities feel invisible. By acting like no one in the job-holding, academically successful audience had a disability, it reinforced the idea that people with disabilities aren’t able to excel. It ensured that these tutors would approach disabled people believing they had limitations instead of believing that they could achieve. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

People with disabilities hold important positions and advanced degrees. They invent products and tell stories. They get involved and make a difference. People with disabilities are breaking barriers and finding visible success more and more, which changes the way people think about disabilities. This thinking hasn’t come as far as I thought, though, based on my colleagues’ reactions in training.

Perhaps it’s because of how we treat disabled people who visibly succeed. The narrative is that they succeeded despite everything the world set against them. If this disabled person did this amazing thing, why can’t you, a nondisabled person?

I once heard a radio DJ talking about how Dan Reynolds from Imagine Dragons got his life back from AS and IBD, and she called it inspirational. What exactly does it inspire? For me, someone else with AS, I can see that story and find hope and motivation in it. But labeling something as “inspirational” in general is empty. What’s inspirational to one person is not to another.

Disabled people are put on a pedestal and patronized, and their stories become novelties. These people are seen as exceptions to the rule that disability prevents achievement, and that’s why they’re celebrated. Dialogue like this puts the focus on people’s disabilities, not what they accomplished. It also doesn’t offer a diverse representation of what disabilities are like by only focusing on one person’s experience (if that’s even covered). These feel-good, “inspirational” stories allow society to pat themselves on the back without actually engaging in any dialogue to understand people and their disabilities. At the end of the day, the people in these stories are still other and alien to most of the people who see them.

We need to change how disabilities are viewed, and that starts with “disability training.” The world already assumes that “disabled” means “limited.” Training for working with people with disabilities that doesn’t acknowledge the normality of so-called disabilities is just failing in its job. It’s ensuring that people view disabilities as strange, mysterious phenomena that separate others from them. It’s establishing “disabled” as a synonym for “unable.”

We’re not separate. We’re colleagues, and friends, and partners. We’re parents and children, students and teachers. We are disabled, but we aren’t unable. We are ready, and motivated, and we will achieve.

-Bri

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