Hello,
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means - as an activist and as a disabled person just trying to live my life - to have hope. What do I have hope for? Is that a useful framing? And actually, do I even have hope as other people understand it?
On the one hand, being an activist is an inherently hopeful thing. To work for change you have to start by believing that change is possible. And I do believe that. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” - or something like that, at least. The evidence is there, too. From the conversations I have with friends to the minds I see change at work to the fact that fifty years ago my mates and I might never have even gone to school, the proof of progress is everywhere. So yes, maybe there is belief, or just the knowledge that what has been done before can be done again. I hold on to it as tightly as I can.
Because let me tell you, hope is a tricky business. I’ve written before about how, for all the evidence of progress, there is plenty of evidence that in many areas we aren’t really making any headway. I’ve written about how hard it is to even get people to acknowledge that ableism exists, let alone get them to do anything about it. And I’ve written about how relentless that ableism is - from daily patronising comments to life-defining moments of exclusion, from online abuse to systematic oppression by the government, from violence against disabled women to the forced institutionalisation of learning disabled or neurodivergent people. It’s difficult to have hope when there’s a fire everywhere you look.
And then there are the very personal ways that I struggle with the concept of hope. One of the many hard things about being disabled is that you can’t assume anything, ever, when it comes to how life might look tomorrow or next year or in a decade. This is actually true for everyone, I know, but nondisabled people live with the illusion of control in a way that looks, well, nice. I was at a gathering this weekend where people were catching up and sharing plans and I was really struck by their casual confidence that things would broadly go to plan. That’s not to say that nondisabled people don’t face real, difficult, painful challenges - of course they do. It’s just that, for some of them, the world sort of just… works. They’re not primed to expect things to go badly, or for some of the things they desperately want to be denied to them simply because society says so. It’s a kind of quiet hope about the future that feels entirely alien to me.
I’m not saying here that I don’t expect good things to happen to me or my disabled friends in the future. Of course I do! I just think that those things will happen because we’ll claw them into being, because we’ll put in the work and fight the wars necessary to get wherever it is we’re trying to go. That’s determination, not hope; it feels different. More motivating, sure, but also fundamentally more depressing. Because, actually, sometimes we won’t be stronger than the forces ranged against us, and, even when we are, sometimes the fight will be too hard and we’ll give up before we make it. That might sound pessimistic to nondisabled people but it isn’t, it’s just an acknowledgement of reality. It’s not that good things won’t happen eventually or that change won’t come - it will, of course it will - it’s that, almost by definition, bad things will happen first.
Knowing this makes it difficult to think of myself as truly hopeful. Pure hope, I think, would require me to ignore what I know to be true - and while it sounds nice, I don’t know that that would help in the long run. I prefer to think of myself and my friends as steeled - ready and raring to defy whoever wants to get in our way. Maybe to some that will sound like a bitter view of life, but it’s not.
Because there is one thing I feel hopeful about: us. Maybe hope isn’t the right word; maybe it’s something akin to faith. But I look at my friends, disabled and not, and at the communities I belong to, and I believe we’ll make it work. I believe we’ll look out for each other, fall apart and put each other back together again. I believe we’ll do hard things and brilliant things and everything in between. I believe we’ll find ways to be happy. I believe we’ll make things better, or at least put our all into trying. Because we already are, every single day. If religious faith is belief in things not seen than my faith in us is simply belief in what I see all around me.
Hope, optimism, belief, faith. Whatever you want to call it, these are slippery notions when it comes to disability. They wax and wane, both over time and between different parts of our lives, but maybe that’s ok. Right now, in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, I feel both hope and hopelessness in equal measure. As we learn time and time again, when it comes to disability and ableism, many things can be true at once. This is one of those times.
With love,
Lucy