黑料导航

For Disability Pride Month,聽Nicole Calma-Roddin, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and counseling, talks about her experience as a disabled person and what that means to her.

There are so many things I want to tell you about disability. For instance, disability is relatively common. , 27 percent of adults in the United States are disabled. I feel I should say something about ableism.  is so baked into our culture that鈥攁s a disabled person鈥擨鈥檓 still learning and working to be more anti-ableist myself. I want to tell you about the  and why it鈥檚 so important. Instead, I鈥檓 going to tell you about what I鈥檓 celebrating about disability lately.

Of course, every disabled person鈥檚 experience is different. For me, I have been disabled for most of my life. I started using the word 鈥渄isabled鈥� tentatively less than a decade ago on forms asking about my disability status. I鈥檝e only started identifying as being disabled in the last five years. The more I embrace my identity as a person who is disabled, the freer I feel. Being disabled means I don鈥檛 need to do things the way everyone else does or try to fit in a mold that never seemed to fit. Maybe none of us should be trying to fit into a mold anyway.

In my experience, being disabled has meant learning to be patient. I鈥檓 bad at this, but I have had to learn the pacing that my body and mind need. As someone with a dynamic disability (a condition that can fluctuate in severity and impact), this pace is different from day to day and sometimes hour to hour. I don鈥檛 always get it right. And it can be frustrating. But disability has taught me to learn to listen and pay attention to my needs. Everyone has needs, whether they have a disability or not, and we all can learn to listen to our needs and the needs of others. We all can learn to honor these needs as valid and important. In disability culture, though, this is just more common.

My disabled friends and I know what it鈥檚 like for our bodies to be unpredictable or to feel inconvenient. Sometimes, one of us has a high pain day when we鈥檙e supposed to get together or video chat. It鈥檚 disappointing, but plans get rescheduled and follow-up texts are sent to see if they鈥檙e feeling better. There is comfort in knowing we鈥檒l be met with grace and care.

Sometimes, my disability highlights my interdependence. This might look like someone else driving me to a doctor鈥檚 appointment or my husband checking a food鈥檚 ingredient label for my allergens when I鈥檓 experiencing fatigue. None of us are independent, though, even if we often like to think of ourselves this way. We are all able to survive only because of the efforts of others growing our food, building the streets we drive on, and creating the technologies that allow us to connect to others and find information using our phones.

To me, being disabled means recognizing our shared human frailty while simultaneously affirming the value of each life. The more I connect with the disability community and embrace my own disabled body, mind, and life, the more I want every body and mind to be seen as valuable and to be treated with dignity, making me more committed to justice and a world where we all can flourish.