Tag: ableism

Disability

WHAT I’M NOT

OUR BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGES

What I am not is the first thing you see.

What I am not is the six legs I used to walk around. 

What I am not is the handlebars I hold onto. 

What I am not is what you see when I walk into a room. 

What I am not is the way you see me on the outside. 

What I am is a person who is just like you. 

What I am is someone with self-worth.

What I am is someone with intelligence. 

What I am is someone with dreams.

What I am is someone with hopes.

What I am not like another person with a disability that you know

What I am not is the label that I was born with 

What I am not is your inspiration 

What I am not the only person in the room with a walker.

What I am not is taking up space in life.

What I am not is letting my disability stop me. 

What I am not is letting my disability affect how I live life.

What I am not is allowing myself to give up on myself.

What I am not is letting my challenges get in my way.

What I am not is letting my fears get in the way. 

What I am is a creative person.

What I am is someone who gives love.

What I am is someone who receives love.

What I am is someone who loves life.

What I am is what you see, what you see me. That is what is called judging what you are visiting in your eyes. When you judge with your eyes, you miss out on life because life is much more than what you see on the outside. When you remove the walker and the disability, all that is life is a person just like you. 

Disability

COFFEE WITH GOD (WK 2 01/12)

OUR BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGES

Dear GOD,

I tried to write to you every Sunday last year, but it didn’t last long. This year, I want to write to you. I have two goals: To get myself healthy and not rely too much on people. I gained a lot of weight, and it affected my independence. I take so much pride in my independence and don’t want to give it up because I can’t keep my mouth shut from eating. I’m not calling upon you because I feel we have that connection yet. If I did call upon you, I would feel I was using you as a 911 button. I fell. 

Second, I would like to have a relationship with you so that when I feel like I need to call upon you, I won’t feel awkward. You don’t judge anyone, but I still judge myself when I feel as if I want to ask you something. For me, it feels as if I’m asking someone I don’t know for money.  A few years ago, I started this program. A lot of it is based on spirituality. I know spirituality and that you are two different things, but you do go hand in hand most of the time. The program has all kinds of people with disabilities. My biggest why is that people with disabilities believe in you and trust in you so much. My mom told me once that people need someone to cling to and gest your it. I just don’t that way. I was born this way for a reason I may not know what that reason is but that ok. It took me very long time to know who I am. There have been parts of me that I haven’t like because of my disability. It was challeging for me to see that when empowered my disability not only did my disability win I won to. For me it wasn’t about believing in you it was about believing in myself.

Did you help me believe in myself? Maybe, but I won’t give you all the credit.

Until next week. 

Thank You,

Marie

Disability

WHAT IS INTERNAL ABLESIM

OUR BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGES

Now that I have discovered what ableism is and how it relates to my life, let us break down what internal ableism is. A  person consciously or unconsciously believes in harmful messages they heard about their disability and applies themself.

I can think of internal ableism in two ways. Internal ableism is what people have put upon you,  saying you can’t do this or that in life and questioning if you can do something. Then there is the internal ableism you place upon yourself about what you think about the community you belong to.

First, let’s take the internal ableism that people place upon you. My PCA said I was slacking off on my activities and more tired. Then she asked if I could live on my own. When she said this, it upset me. I didn’t want to tell her at the time, but I felt she was ableislizing me and making me think that I wasn’t capable when I had been living on my own for almost three years and the first year and a half was all on my own because of the pandemic. 

She watched videos of others with CP and felt like I was not as independent or pushing myself as much as they were. It is hard for anyone to understand that no CPs are alike and that everyone with CP has their limits and internal ways of pushing themselves. 

I have been fighting this all my life. For many years, I have internalized these assumptions put upon me about having a disability and cerebral palsy.

At this point in my life, I shouldn’t feel this way or let other people make me feel this way.

Now, to the internal ableism that I placed upon myself.

For many years, I was scared of my disability and socializing with anyone in the cerebral palsy community. If I associated with others in the cerebral palsy community, I might not have internalized my fear of the cerebral palsy community as much as I did.

When I was very young and going for physical therapy at the rehab center, feeling if I went near others with more involved CP than I had, I would somehow catch their CP. Growing up, I had a group of friends with disabilities, and I was okay with them.  

As I got older, the internal ableism about myself and CP only grew more aggressive. I was in college, and others with CP would come up to me and want to be friends or ask me on a date; however, I would just run the other way, not wanting to have anything to day with another person with CP. I would make every excuse to say I didn’t want to get to know the person. When the truth was, I wasn’t comfortable with who I was, a person with a disability.

The way I felt about myself and my disability was just getting worse over time. Family and friends would say I should change my outlook on my disability, or else I  would not get anywhere. 

It wasn’t until I got hit with an unwanted disability. At 35, I ended up with PsA (Psoratic Arthritis). When you are born with a disability such as CP, you hope you don’t have any more challenges with your health, but unfortunately, when you have one disability, it doesn’t stop you from getting other health issues. When I developed PsA, I wasn’t sure where my life was going.  

One night,  I was at a fork in the road; if I didn’t pick up my life, I would not return from a dark place.  Looking at my two disabilities now, I needed to accept one. I knew the PsA would go away at some point, but the CP was, is, and will always be a part of me. That night, I began my journey to discovering who I was with CP. 

After many years of internal ableism, my disability I taught myself that just because my disability makes me seen as different, my disability and what people say or think about me shouldn’t stop me from being who I need and want to be.

Disability

WHAT IS ABLEISM

OUR BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGES

I have to be honest; I only learned about ableism and internal ableism not too long ago during a Zoom meeting. As someone with a disability who claims to be a mentor for people with disabilities, why didn’t I know what internalism and ableism are? I should be embarrassed. I had to go back and look up ableism and internal ableism to understand what they entirely meant. As I was reading about them, glimpses of times in my life when I felt I was a burden to people or groups came rushing back. Knowing there were terms to describe what I was going through at those times put a whole new meaning to those experiences in my life. 

Let’s first break down ableism and what it means, as I had experienced and felt when it came to ableism.

Ableism is discrimination against a person with a disability. Knowing what ableism is now, I can genuinely say ableism has affected me from an early age. Ableism is what made me stand out throughout my childhood.

I was born in the late ’70s  and grew up in the ’80s and ‘90s while experiencing ableism. Although I have cerebral palsy, my family has always integrated me with non-disabled children. I attended school in my hometown. Growing up during this time, the ADA Act of 1973 stated that everyone with a disability had the right to be in public places and the right to an education just like others. You might imagine that having this law would make life easier. While the law was written to give people like me and others with disabilities all these rights, it was not easy to get people to change their outlook on those with disabilities and follow through on the law.

Growing up in a small farming town in the 1980s and ’90s was challenging. As the saying goes, it felt like my family and I were rocking the boat. 

I started school at an early age. Teachers were unsure how to teach someone like me; they would say I was unteachable and I was just taking the place of another child who could be there. In music class, they wouldn’t let me use a recorder, and I drooled too much to try it, or they didn’t want me in the lunch room because I would sometimes chew with my mouth open. 

The other kids did not give me trouble, but the educators showed me ableism when they were the ones who should have been educating me and the others around me. The educators should have been helping, teaching me about life, and helping me overcome my challenges, but in the end, they added more challenges to a young child’s life.  My school district eventually became more integrated, bringing more severely disabled students back into our hometown school community.

I was almost denied the education that I deserved from the start.  The school had to make classes to accommodate me and others needing the same or similar accommodations. It can be hard to change an educated mind if they have worked under a specific premise for years. When given a student who needed all these varied accommodations and help to understand what I was going through, it was difficult for the educators to meet my specific needs. Looking back on those times and being the person I am today, I can better understand how difficult it might have been for some educators to change their teaching style to accommodate me. I am not saying what they did was right because it wasn’t, but I can understand how hard it might be for someone with a particular philosophy or style to change their style to meet an INDIVIDUAL student’s needs.

There was yet another hurdle when the ADA Act of 1990 came around. The ADA Act of 1990 states that public and federal buildings should accommodate all people, no matter race or disability. That means many things:  all buildings should be made to accommodate those who need their physical needs met; all parking lots should have enough accessible parking, curb-cut offs, doors, halls, and restrooms to accommodate physical limitations. The results from my family taking on these physical barriers for me are evident today. People are unaware of this initial struggle and may take today’s accommodations for granted. Yet, my family and I pioneered changing our small town in the USA. 

While trying to complete this assignment, I contacted one of my first teachers with me from day one of my public school experience. I want to share her experience as a teacher at that particular time in my life. She provided insight from an educator’s perspective. “As a teacher, we had to assure other teaching professionals of what we could do. To encourage them to continue to challenge you while meeting your specific needs. It took a long time for building improvements to take place to allow you to be more independent throughout the physical school building. As a result, you sometimes required one-on-one paraprofessional support, not due to YOUR physical limitations but due to your physical environments and the existing physical barriers within the school setting”.

I didn’t realize at the time that I may have felt like the odd one out, but I was not only giving myself the right to access public buildings but paving the way for those who followed after me as well. If I were to attend my hometown high school at present, there would be so much more they could offer me to support my ‘ABILITIES’:more integrated classrooms, opportunities for community involvement (Best Buddies, Unified Sports, etc.), and a transition program for 18 to 21-year-olds.  I was lucky to have a supportive family and the strength to challenge myself by taking courses at a local community college and continuing my educational experiences online, creating a personal connection to others with CP.  I demonstrated what adults with CP were capable of when given a chance. Also, creating dialogue and essential discussions around issues other adults with CP could relate to. At the same time, opening the eyes of the non-disabled to understand better what adults with CP were capable of. I created awareness, compassion, and empathy for those discriminated against due to ‘ABLEISM.’

Disability

WHAT IS INTERAL ABLEISM?

OUR BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGES

Now that I have discovered what ableism is and how it relates to my life, let us break down what internal ableism is. A  person consciously or unconsciously believes in harmful messages they heard about their disability and applies themself.

I can think of internal ableism in two ways. Internal ableism is what people have put upon you,  saying you can’t do this or that in life and questioning if you can do something. Then there is the internal ableism you place upon yourself about what you think about the community you belong to.

First, let’s take the internal ableism that people place upon you. My PCA said I was slacking off on my activities and more tired. Then she asked if I could live on my own. When she said this, it upset me. I didn’t want to tell her at the time, but I felt she was ableislizing me and making me think that I wasn’t capable when I had been living on my own for almost three years and the first year and a half was all on my own because of the pandemic. 

She watched videos of others with CP and felt like I was not as independent or pushing myself as much as they were. It is hard for anyone to understand that no CPs are alike and that everyone with CP has their limits and internal ways of pushing themselves. 

I have been fighting this all my life. For many years, I have internalized these assumptions put upon me about having a disability and cerebral palsy.

At this point in my life, I shouldn’t feel this way or let other people make me feel this way.

Now, to the internal ableism that I placed upon myself.

For many years, I was scared of my disability and socializing with anyone in the cerebral palsy community. If I associated with others in the cerebral palsy community, I might not have internalized my fear of the cerebral palsy community as much as I did.

When I was very young and going for physical therapy at the rehab center, feeling if I went near others with more involved CP than I had, I would somehow catch their CP. Growing up, I had a group of friends with disabilities, and I was okay with them.  

As I got older, the internal ableism about myself and CP only grew more aggressive. I was in college, and others with CP would come up to me and want to be friends or ask me on a date; however, I would just run the other way, not wanting to have anything to day with another person with CP. I would make every excuse to say I didn’t want to get to know the person. When the truth was, I wasn’t comfortable with who I was, a person with a disability.

The way I felt about myself and my disability was just getting worse over time. Family and friends would say I should change my outlook on my disability, or else I  would not get anywhere. 

It wasn’t until I got hit with an unwanted disability. At 35, I ended up with PsA (Psoratic Arthritis). When you are born with a disability such as CP, you hope you don’t have any more challenges with your health, but unfortunately, when you have one disability, it doesn’t stop you from getting other health issues. When I developed PsA, I wasn’t sure where my life was going.  

One night,  I was at a fork in the road; if I didn’t pick up my life, I would not return from a dark place.  Looking at my two disabilities now, I needed to accept one. I knew the PsA would go away at some point, but the CP was, is, and will always be a part of me. That night, I began my journey to discovering who I was with CP. 

After many years of internal ableism, my disability I taught myself that just because my disability makes me seen as different, my disability and what people say or think about me shouldn’t stop me from being who I need and want to be.