Thoughts (or lack thereof) on Disability

At the beginning of October, the Gazette’s board approached me and asked that I write a piece on disability, in conjunction with the month’s theme. I said “sure,” and set about thinking up an idea for an article about disability. 

I kept coming up blank.

In truth, I don’t think about disability all that much. It does not come up in my daily life as something to consider. I do not speak often about it with friends, family, or any communities I’m part of–including here at GU-Q.

And it was exactly that realization that let me write this.

I don’t want this to be an academic survey of why we don’t talk about disability, something that has been done time and time again. Anyone with basic background knowledge on disability knows why anyway–something like a combination of societal shame surrounding disability and the lack of intersectionality in spaces to include disability. So put away any expectations you have for citations or news articles–I’m keeping it conversational today.

So, if not that, then what are we doing here? I’m proposing another dimension to the barriers surrounding the conversations on disability, and that is the extent of seriousness with which the subject is treated. Now, I don’t mean to say that disability isn’t a serious subject. On the contrary, there are severe and legitimate issues surrounding disability that have a place in our lives and we should be making an effort to readily consider disability an disabled people’s needs, whether they are physically or mentally disabled, in our communities. 

Instead, what I mean is that the seriousness of disability as a subject of discussion makes conversations surrounding it cagey, awkward, or stiff. People are so often afraid of being incorrect or even offensive in their opinions on disability that they’d–we’d–choose instead to avoid those discussions altogether. And when we stop talking about something, it fades from our minds. 

It also has to do with the academic nature with which we approach disability. Believe me, I recognise the irony of this point in a university setting, somewhere inherently academic. However, its salience here is exactly why it needs to be brought up. Discussions on disability need to be academic, serious, backed up by statistics and grim testimonies about how a grandmother with arthritis can’t pick up her grandchild. This attitude narrows the scope of conversations on disability considerably–even more than our awkwardness around it. Once again, I reiterate that disability is a serious subject that should not be flippantly toyed with. However, our lack of flexibility with it is the subject’s downfall.

The entire point of disability awareness movements is not just to bring awareness to disability, but to bring the subject into conversation by any means. We cannot treat this like a temporary moment of clarity or some background event in our lives. For a lot of people, this isn’t background. Nor can we treat this like some phenomenon to be studied from 500 kilometers away via telescope, packed with news articles and published papers. For a lot of people, this isn’t academic. This is their daily life, not a tragedy. We need to stop treating it like one.