Sometimes Pride breaks your heart

THIS ISSUE COMES WITH A BIG OL’ WARNING ABOUT ABLEIST VIEWS OF THE VALUE OF DISABLED LIVES

Hello,

I love the idea of Disability Pride Month with every fibre of myself. But I’ve written before about how it is often ignored or overlooked. It’s always a bit disappointing.

This year, though, it feels heavy and sad. I so desperately want to celebrate, but every disabled person I know is scared, angry and exhausted. We have been forced to fight so hard this year and, frankly, you can only keep it up for so long before it starts to affect you. We are all, I think, well past that point, but there’s little let up in sight.

I suppose it’s gratifying that we won the battle on Pip cuts this week, but it feels like we’re a long way from winning the war on disability benefits in general (the gutted government bill still cuts the health element of Universal Credit, given to the sickest and poorest disabled people). The thing that has really got to me though - that has got to all of us - is the passage of the assisted dying bill through the Commons.

I’ve written enough elsewhere about why this bill is a danger to disabled people and honestly I am in no mood to relitigate it here. What I do want to talk about is the tidal wave of ableism the whole episode has allowed to flood the public sphere.

People in my life never quite believe me when I tell them how commonly random strangers inform disabled people that if they were in our shoes they’d kill themselves. But they do. All the time. I think I am protected from it a bit in real life because I’m very rarely alone, but it has nevertheless happened to me enough times that it’s not a rarity. The thing is though, in the past few weeks I have been sent or seen hundreds of tweets to that effect, as have all the disability activists I know. Even worse, perhaps, is that a version of this rhetoric - differently phrased, perhaps, but based on the same ideas - has made its way into the media and public debate and even, yes, the Commons, every time someone has appealed for assisted dying for those poor people who can’t do anything for themselves. Or, you know, people like me and my mates.

Can you imagine the toll of that? To be exceedingly clear, the issue is not that these messages tap into some deep feelings I have towards myself. Absolutely not. The issue is that these messages remind me, again and again and again, that a big chunk of society views the good, complicated, hard, beautiful lives my friends and I lead as a fate worse than death. And - what can I say? - after a while that gets into your psyche.

How does this relate to Disability Pride? Certainly not in any obvious way. We think of Pride as happy, celebratory, maybe even fun - and Lord knows these issues are not those things. But I think Pride is more than that. It’s knowing your worth in the face of the constant devaluing of your life. It’s demanding more from a world that wants to give you less and less. It’s self-acceptance in the face of hate.

And, as I have said over and over again, it is absolute, blood-brothers-esque devotion to the people you’re fighting alongside. This is non-negotiable. As sure as I know that the sky is blue, I know that I am bound to disabled people everywhere. And, as I have also said before in this very newsletter, Pride is just another word for love. It’s why, sometimes, when the people you have such pride in are hurting, it completely breaks your heart.

In solidarity always,
Lucy x