Stop sugarcoating ableism
How the most hurtful ableist incident I've ever experienced changed me for better and for worse
Hello,
The past few weeks, a quote from the author Marian Keyes has been bloating around social media: "I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'"
I mean, it's a cheesy quote, right? It’s almost banal in how obvious the sentiment is. The first few times I saw it, my instinct was to roll my eyes. But I've found it stuck in my brain. The internet has been using it in relation to world events, particularly Covid, but the reason it stuck in my brain is that when I first read it, one particular thing immediately sprung to mind. And it took me my surprise.
Because of all the many strange things that have happened in to me and changed me - and as a disabled person, there have been so many - my immediate thought was of the dating agency that turned me away for being a wheelchair user. And I don't mean the fiasco that followed - the viral tweet and the media reaction and parlaying it all into a new career - although, yes, that all did change me. I mean the actual fact of it. The fact that one day in February 2021 I chose to trust someone, and a few days later she sat in front of a screen and told me in writing that I was too disabled to love. The fact that the majority of the world thinks exactly the same thing. The fact that I tried and tried, that I was brave over and over again, and all that happened was I got hurt over and over again too.
It was undoubtedly a very strange thing to go through. And I've written a lot about how that moment changed my approach to things as varied as dating, ableism and my purpose in life, mostly for the better. But I haven't written about how it also changed me in ways that are much harder to face, because they are and dark and bitter.
I don't think I even knew how much it had affected me until I started to think about dipping my toes back into the big scary rough ocean of dating and couldn't name the emotion that overcame me. It wasn't fear or anxiety per se (or rather, it wasn't just those things), and it wasn't hopelessness or despair (because if it had been, I wouldn't have even been trying). It was a thick, dark, cloying dread; akin to the feeling I get when I enter a hospital and every cell in my body is screaming at me to run, as if hoping to meet someone for a coffee presents some existential risk.
At times in the past few months, whatever it has done to me has made me a version of myself that I intensely dislike. I know dating makes everyone a bit doolally, a bit insecure, a bit messy and needy and fretful. But this is something else: this is something that compelled me into a blind panic over the fact some girl I was meeting didn't know I have a speech impairment. This, when I happily give speeches to hundreds of people. This, when I volunteer to go on TV precisely to show that people who sound like me belong in the public eye. (For what it's worth, I went on the date and I don't think she cared, we just didn't fancy each other!). I don’t want to be a person who cares what other people think of my speech impediment, or my disability in general, and for the most part I’m not, but when it comes to dating I find myself primed for people to be hurtful, and it’s a horrible, horrible thing.
I think I’m angrier these days, too. Some of that anger is really productive - it fuels my activism and my writing, makes me do things that scare me, and is a vessel for turning all that hurt outwards, thank god, rather than in. But it’s not all productive, some of it is anything but; it makes me want to snap at people who are just trying to help, to turn away from outstretched arms and kind faces because they don’t know what this feels like, what it is to be haunted by the typed words of someone you never even met. It makes me want to rage against the world and separate myself from it, to build a wall with no windows, and sometimes the biggest effort of the week is cracking open the door to all the possibility I know is out there.
It was so strange, and it changed me. For a long time, I told people I was oddly glad it happened; that this new life and career and sense of myself was worth the wounding. I did honestly believe that for a while, and to some extent I think there was some truth in it - I am glad I did what I did next and I truly don’t think I would have done it without that email. But I think I can be thankful for what I did with the cards I was dealt and wish I’d had different sodding cards.
Why am I writing this to you? Partly because I promised readers of this newsletter an honest account of my particular disabled life, and this is what I’ve been thinking about recently. But also because, while the circumstances are specific to me and what happened, a lot of what I’ve written here applies more widely - to disabled people and nondisabled people alike. As the viral quote from Keyes says, we are under such pressure to find the positives in the bad things that happen to us. That can’t be good for anyone - it’s called “toxic positivity” for a reason - but I think we expect it even more from disabled people. We are told to shrug off ableism, to know better, to not let ignorance and hate get us down because - hey, look! - not everyone is ignorant and hateful. But always looking for the silver lining prevents us from coming to terms with the hulking grey cloud.
And I also wonder if it weakens our resolve to do something about it - to pass around some much-needed umbrellas because getting pelted with freezing rain isn’t that bad. “Can’t you disabled people just use the torrential downpour of ableism as an excuse to dance?” society seems to ask. And isn’t that exactly what I’ve been doing for almost three years now, pretending in this newsletter and to my friends that that email only changed me in good ways, only led me to dance, rather than saying sometimes I am soaked and insecure and angry?
Those of you who have read my book will know that one of the things I tried to do with it is stop sugar-coating the effects of ableism. Now I’m trying to do that in life, especially as I take some more tentative steps towards dating again (ugh). Because if I’m not honest about it, if we aren’t honest about it, we’ll be so distracted by silver linings that we never quite make it out into the sunshine.
See you next week,
Lucy
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Women's lives are shaped by sexism and expectations. Disabled people's lives are shaped by ableism and a complete lack of expectations. But what happens when you're subjected to both sets of rules?
This powerful, honest, hilarious and furious memoir from journalist and advocate Lucy Webster looks at life at the intersection; the struggles, the joys and the unseen realities of being a disabled woman. From navigating the worlds of education and work, dating and friendship; to managing care; contemplating motherhood; and learning to accept your body against a pervasive narrative that it is somehow broken and in need of fixing, The View From Down Here shines a light on what it really means to move through the world as a disabled woman.