We need Pride because disabled people are still made to feel ashamed

Disability Pride Month is vitally important. Here's why

Hello,

This week, I’ve seen a few of those predictable “how can you be proud to be disabled?” and “what the hell is Disability Pride Month?” posts, as I do every year. These questions are deliberately boneheaded, obviously, and I have no intention of addressing them.

There is one, though, that I think is worth exploring, because it actually serves the community to answer it: “why do we need Disability Pride?”

So here it is:

It’s because without Pride, we’ve just got shame.

I don’t mean to be dramatic, but it’s true.

I have yet to meet a single disabled person (myself very much included) for whom shame has not been a big part of life. Whether we’ve been disabled our whole lives or became disabled later, whether our impairments are non-apparent or announce themselves to the world, whether we have community or not, whether we’re activists or just trying to live our lives, shame is there, colouring everything.

Even when we know better. Sometimes especially when we know better, because then we feel ashamed of the shame (what a hoot).

What I notice again and again is that we all hold shame about remarkably similar things. Needing help or feeling like a burden. Getting upset about discrimination rather than angry. Clothes not fitting us properly. Having to ask people to change plans. Being constantly noticed. Not being productive enough. Not moving through life at the same speed or in the same order or even in the same direction as our nondisabled peers.

It would be easy, I think, to witness these similarities in shame that we all hold and assume that they are inherent to the experience of disability. But the other thing I notice again and again when we talk about this stuff is that we can all point to the things that made us feel ashamed. Maybe it was the other kids who pointed and whispered, maybe it was the friend who got annoyed at us for cancelling dinner, maybe it was the doctor who said we were exaggerating, maybe it was the boss who equated presence with skill, maybe it was the date who looked horrified when we shared something vulnerable. Maybe it was all the strangers who reacted to our presence like we were aliens who’d just arrived from outer space. We didn’t just decide to pick up shame and carry it around; thousands of interactions with thousands of people placed a little more and then a little more of it on our shoulders, and then acted surprised when we said it was heavy.

Pride gives us permission to put it down again. And permission to know that society’s shame was never really ours to carry.

That’s why we need it.

Pride says that not only were none of those things our fault, they weren’t even bad things in the first place. It says there’s nothing wrong with being disabled, or needing things, or being different, or doing things on your own timeline. And it says that none of those things say anything about your worth as a person.

In a world that demands that disabled people feel ashamed, the power to reject it is not only politically radical but personally life-changing. Being free of all that weight is profoundly liberating. So yeah, we need a month.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Pride and shame are binary, this-or-that states. For most of us, they actually exist together, or at least consecutively (as in, you can’t really feel that capital-P Pride if you never felt shame). Being proud now doesn’t erase the shame you felt when you were younger or its lingering effects in the present. It doesn’t mean it’s always easy or automatic to reject shame when it inevitably bubbles up. And it doesn’t mean that some days the shame isn’t the loudest voice in your own head. Pride can mitigate shame, of course, but it doesn’t cancel it out, especially as society is always trying to give you more shame while denying your right to be proud.

Even those of us who are genuinely, deeply proud to be disabled still feel some of this societally-induced shame. Yes, even me. I feel a lot less of it than I ever did before, and yet on a bad day I could still real off a list of things I sometimes feel shame about, from my lack of romantic experience to how much I still rely on my parents, from how anxious I get to how often ableism makes me cry, from how much I still feel like an outsider to how much I care about how people react to my voice. That doesn’t mean I’m not proud, or that I intellectually think any of these things are reasons to feel shame (I would, obviously, never judge anyone else for them). It just means that I am a human being alive in a world not built for me, and I have understandably internalised at least some of the nonsense. You’d have to be made of granite not to.

Disability Pride is the antidote to all of that. That’s why it’s not an abstract thing or a nice-to-have for me. That’s why I bang on and on and on about it. That’s why it’s the guiding force in my life. Not because I never felt shame or don’t anymore, but because I did - a lot - and occasionally still do. Disability Pride is important to me not just because I think other people need it but because I need it, every day, in July and far beyond.

With love,
Luce