Tag Archives: disability

Accessibility + Dis/ability

When the Door Opens for Everyone but You

Leave a comment

Imagine a new friend invites you to a party at their house. When you arrive, you knock on the door, but nobody answers. You try the door but it won’t open. You step over to the sidewalk to check that you have the address correct. From the sidewalk, you notice other people arriving and having no trouble getting in, but when you return to the door, it won’t budge for you. You text your friend, but they are probably busy greeting guests and don’t respond to your message. Finally, you decide to ask the next person arriving to hold the door open for you but when you do, they say, “Well aren’t you high maintenance?” They were probably joking, you tell yourself, but before you can respond, the door has swung shut again. By this time, you feel very dejected, not to mention worn out from pulling and pushing on the door. You are now in no mood to socialize. You go home, wondering what just happened.

The next day your friend texts you, apologizing for not seeing your message the night before. You are still too confused and exhausted from the experience to have a conversation about it, but the next time you see your friend, you explain that you tried to get in but couldn’t open the door. They look at you with confusion. “Nobody else had any trouble,” they say. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” You want to explain that you did, but you’re already feeling a bit foolish, so you just let it go.

You might laugh off this odd occurrence if it happened only once. Now imagine that this happens every day, everywhere you go: at work, at the grocery store, at restaurants, at school, at church, at the homes of every friend and family member. Nobody else seems to have trouble getting in. It’s just you.

This is what it’s like for a disabled person trying to access spaces that are designed with only non-disabled people in mind. You can take this basic metaphor and extend it in different ways to understand the experience of a disabled person. For example, as a vision-impaired person, I can usually get into a space but then I often can’t access what’s happening in the space because the signs, slides, handouts, etc. aren’t visible to me. A neurodivergent person may, like me, be able to physically enter the space, but then may find the social cues others notice to be invisible to them.

It’s frustrating and confusing. When I first can’t see what others see, I often don’t even know they see something I don’t. I sometimes wonder how everyone else knows where to go for a meeting—it often turns out there are signs that I don’t see. Asking for help is often unproductive because I don’t know what I’m missing so I don’t know what to ask for. Or, like the person who asks for help getting into the party and is met with a sarcastic response, my requests for help are greeted with snide comments because my disability isn’t apparent. (I am so tired of people pointing at signs I can’t read when I ask for help!)

As my hypothetical scenario shows, there’s no malice on the part of the friend who throws the party or even the people who don’t help. They are just oblivious to the plight of the person who can’t get in. But the lack of malice doesn’t make the situation easier for the person who can’t get in.

Last week I spent a few days in Washington, DC, doing research related to disability at several national sites. I saw lots of gestures toward accessibility that I appreciated—and yet, the doors still don’t open easily for everyone.

The National Mall: I was surprised to learn that the FDR memorial is the only one of the 100+ memorials and monuments on the National Mall to include Braille on some of its exhibits. All of the memorials and monuments have brochures in Braille available and are wheelchair accessible. A park ranger explained that the FDR memorial includes Braille as a nod to FDR being disabled himself. (I was surprised at how powerful it was to see the statues depicting FDR using his wheelchair—I’ve seen wheelchairs in photos, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a statue.)

As much as I appreciated the availability of Braille brochures at the sites, every time a disabled person has to ask for accommodations, they are the person trying to get into the party at the house where the door seems to open for everyone but them. That feeling of not being able to get into the house where the party is compounds over time. Asking for a brochure isn’t a big deal. Having to ask for a brochure constantly, day after day, wears a person out. Annika Konrad calls this being worn out feeling access fatigue.

Gallaudet University: Another day I went to Gallaudet University’s National Deaf Life Museum. The museum itself was very thought-provoking, especially the exhibit on HIV/AIDS and the Deaf community. The title of the exhibit was “Left Behind” and it focused on how Deaf people didn’t have access to information about HIV/AIDS during the epidemic.

The museum is in a beautiful campus building that exhibits the traditional academic architecture Jay Dolmage talks about in Academic Ableism. From the front, it appears the only way in is up a foreboding set of stone steps. I walked around the building looking for a wheelchair accessible entrance out of curiosity and did find one, but there was no indication at the front of the building where to find the accessible entrance. A person using a wheelchair would likely need to ask a random passerby for help finding it.

I want a world in which the doors open for everyone, but I wonder if it’s even possible. Surely it would be possible to put an attractive and high contrast sign in front of a building indicating where the accessible entrance is—or better yet, make the main entrance accessible. Design Braille into the next monument. Find ways to prop the doors open.

grieving, mental illness

Welcoming Depression Back into My Life

Leave a comment

A couple weeks ago I realized my grief was veering into depression. Depression has been a constant in my life since I was about 8, but at that time, the world thought 8 year-olds couldn’t have depression, so I was just considered moody and bitchy. I was finally diagnosed in my teens and got on anti-depressants, which I took until my early 20s, when I was able to taper off of them and mange my depression with meditation, exercise, and lots of intentional choices about food and alcohol.

I was always aware that I was off medication “for now” and knew that I might need to go back on it at some point. Last year, when I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and panic attacks, I started taking a low dose of Escitalopram, which can help with both anxiety and depression.

Over the last few months, many of the things I’ve attributed to grief had started to happen less frequently. I was still feeling intense grief but not every minute of every day, and sometimes I could go entire days without feeling intense grief. My appetite returned. My sleep was mostly regular. The sneaker waves of grief came less often. I didn’t feel compelled to visit my late husband’s bench every day.

But last month, I started wanting to sleep all the time again. I slept through my alarm in the morning. I craved sugar. I didn’t want to work out, which is one of my favorite things to do.  

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that instead of feeling my normal grief mindset of “life is hard today but it will pass,” I was thinking “life is hard.” I didn’t have my usual sense of temporariness. I felt a kind of doom I’ve come to understand as anxiety, but it wasn’t anxiety. Anxiety shows up in my stomach and chest, but this doom was showing up everywhere. It was all encompassing, like a weight holding me down. It felt physical, as if a heavy blanket had been thrown over me and I had to drag it around with me all day. I couldn’t shake the heavy blanket or get out from under it.  

It happened slowly enough that I didn’t quite recognize that anything was different. Then I started reading Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich, which is part memoir about her own experience of living with depression. Some of her descriptions of how depression felt resonated intensely with me. She uses words like “pervasive” and “relentless” and describes being unable to work on a project she had been passionate about and “the impossibility of physical relaxation.”

My first thought was, “It sounds like grief,” and then I realized grief hadn’t felt at all like that in a long time. I went back through my journal and saw the proof there that I had not always felt like I was dragging a heavy blanket around.

I’m now taking an increased dose of Escitalopram. The increase pretty much made me sleep for two days straight, but now I can stay awake all day and I’m starting to feel more like myself.

Just as I tried to make friends with my anxiety (we are closer now but not quite friends), I am trying to take a non-combative approach to my depression. It is part of me and if I love myself, I must love the depression in some way.

Two ideas have been helpful to me in this regard:

When I started grad school in 1993, nobody knew me or my past as a person with depression, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide it, but I also wasn’t bringing it to anyone’s attention. A few months ago, I added “I live with low vision” to my online bio, and soon after that I added anxiety to the list. A week or so ago, I added depression to the list.

Acknowledging publicly that anxiety and depression are part of my identity feels risky. Mental illness is still stigmatized and often seen as opposed to critical thinking, which is prized in academia. But I know from casual conversations that many of my students and colleagues live with mental illness. (I have tenure and am a full professor, so if I feel nervous about the disclosure, imagine how folks with less job security feel.)

Acknowledging depression in my bio is one way I am being compassionate towards myself and owning my depression.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, caregiving, grieving

What Being a Caregiver Taught Me About Gracefully Receiving Help

Leave a comment

I’ve talked before about how accepting help from others benefits those who give the help as well as those who receive it. When I was my late husband’s caregiver, I was giving help on a large scale—and I was receiving the benefits of that on a large scale, too.

I spent most of the last year of my husband’s life taking care of him. The entire left side of his body was paralyzed. Without use of the left side of his body, he couldn’t roll over in bed or get dressed or undressed. I woke up several times during the night to reposition him in bed, I dressed and undressed him every day, I helped him sit up, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, and move from his wheelchair to the bed or vice versa.

I also had to take into account the cognitive impacts of his stroke. His speech was slower than before the stroke and his memory was undependable. He also had a mysterious condition called left neglect in which his brain didn’t process anything that happened to the left of his midline. He would start reading from the middle of a line of text because his brain didn’t process the left side of the page. He would eat all the food on the right side of his plate and ask for more, even though the left side his plate hadn’t been touched. I had to constantly remind him to look to his left.

It was a lot of work. Caregiving is never ending. Those facts are true, but what they don’t capture is that it can also be intensely connecting. I was exhausted AND I savored every moment that I got to care for him.

Many people have said to me since my husband died “I’m sure you miss him but don’t miss the caregiving,” but in his last year, the two were inseparable. Being with Tom meant always being on alert for him dropping his phone, losing track of something that was right in front of him because it was slightly to his left, having a sudden urgent need for the bathroom, becoming disoriented and anxious. It was hard for both of us. But when I remember him, my mind goes first to those memories—because it wasn’t only hard for both of us. It was also incredibly intimate and connecting.

Our communication skills got gold-medal good. We really learned what it means to ask for what you want, to not take each other for granted, and to not expect your partner to be a mind reader.

I recently read a book by Sarah Smith Rainey called Love, Sex, and Disability: The Pleasures of Care that moves beyond the exhaustion and exploitation of (mostly female) caregivers and addresses how much true pleasure can be involved. Rainey studied married couples in which one partner was the caregiver for the other. Rainey’s research is groundbreaking because her research looks at the experience of the cared for as well as the caregiver. Typically caregiving relationships are assumed to be one-sided, with the caregiver doing all the work and the cared for doing all the receiving. In fact, many of the couples Rainey interviewed reported that their relationships were reciprocal, which is what I found with my late husband.

He allowed me to take care of him, which is much more complicated than it sounds. As you can imagine, going from his pre-stroke state of being fiercely independent to his post-stroke state of needing the level of care I described above was a huge adjustment for him. I was amazed at the grace he exhibited in accepting the shift. Rather than stubbornly resisting my caregiving—which, frankly, is what I expected him to do—he put his energy into showing appreciation all day every day for my caregiving. That was how he took care of me.

The experience helped me make a commitment to my daughter: if/when I need caregiving at some point in my life, I will be as graceful and accepting of it as Tom was. I got to practice that commitment last fall when I had brain surgery and my daughter took care of me for a week. She had to remind me a few times of my commitment, but I did ok overall, and it actually got easier each day.

Most of us who live long enough will find ourselves in need of caregiving at some point. We can make it a nightmare for everyone by being stubborn and refusing to accept help or we can receive the help gracefully.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving

Recognizing Internalized Ableism on My Anniversary

Leave a comment

Today would have been my anniversary with Tom. Today IS my anniversary with Tom. My inclination is to write the first sentence because I am no longer his wife, but I realize that whether he’s dead or alive, today IS the date we got married in 2011. There is much that was and much that still is. My love for him and the life we had together is just as strong as it was when he was here to celebrate with me. But that life is a memory now, and as much as I love the life I am living now, it is not a life with Tom.

I was at a conference last week and knew my anniversary was coming up, but lost track of which day it was. My return flight yesterday got significantly delayed and I ended up not getting home until after midnight. After crawling into bed, I was almost asleep when suddenly I realized that because it was after midnight, it was my anniversary.

That realization, on the heels of a long travel day, kicked off my anxiety and big tears. My mind kept going back to our last anniversary together, after his stroke and just a few months before he died. We went to one of our favorite restaurants and they were woefully unprepared to greet a guest using a wheelchair. The next morning over brunch, Tom took my hand and apologized for not having understood the challenges of my being disabled.

It was an incredible acknowledgment. The last few years, he had been incredibly supportive but when I first started mentioning that my vision didn’t seem right, he was skeptical. Like many people in my life, he wondered if I was exaggerating things or just not trying hard enough to see. Especially when my disability inconvenienced him, he would ask me if I was really trying. It was maddening for both of us.

I finally understood at some point that he hadn’t not believed me but that he hadn’t been ready to accept that I was going to have to deal with the challenges of a disability for the rest of my life. I noticed a similar resistance in myself when Tom’s doctor told me there was a high likelihood that Tom would never walk again. My immediate response was that of course Tom would walk again because I knew he would work hard in physical therapy.

But no matter how hard he worked, walking unassisted was out of his reach. I kept thinking he just had to work a little harder, but even as I had that thought, I knew it wasn’t accurate. All of his physical therapists were astounded at how much progress he made and how hard he did work. It wasn’t about hard work—it was about the stroke having knocked offline the part of his brain that handled his left side. I saw the MRI images and the massive infarct, the technical term for the brain tissue killed by the stroke. Two-thirds of one hemisphere of his brain just didn’t exist anymore.

Even knowing it wasn’t about how hard he worked, my own brain kept grasping at the idea that if he just worked a little harder, maybe, maybe, he would walk again. I realize now that that’s the line of thinking he followed when he wondered if I was trying hard enough to see.

This is what internalized ableism looks like: me wishing my husband would work hard enough to walk again, him wishing I would try hard enough to see what he saw. The line of thinking might originate with optimism and hoping for a “positive” outcome, but there are at least two big problems with that rationalization. First, it attributes the desired outcome with hard work and less than the desired outcome with not enough work, and second, it assumes that walking, in my husband’s case, and what is considered normal vision, in my case, are the only outcomes that can be judged successful.

On this anniversary, I miss everything about that man who used a wheelchair, including his wheelchair. His physical and occupational therapy sessions were often team efforts, with both of us working together to get him somewhere or accomplish a task together. It helped us realize in a concrete way that we were always on the same team. We hated the stroke and the pain it caused Tom, but it opened up some opportunities for us to communicate better and become closer.

I celebrated this anniversary by sleeping in, being gentle with myself, and sharing memories with my daughter. I went to Tom’s bench and talked to him for a bit. I got a few emails and texts from loved ones, acknowledging the anniversary, which I appreciated. I felt lucky to have had such a great love and proud of the life I am living now, which was shaped in so many ways by my relationship with Tom.  

Accessibility + Dis/ability

The Real Reason Why Going to Conferences Is So Exhausting to Me

Leave a comment

I came home this weekend from two back-to-back conferences in Chicago that left me exhausted. I only spent one full day at each conference, so I shouldn’t be that tired, but navigating conferences as a disabled person takes a lot of stamina. This is true even though accessibility gets talked about a lot more now than just a few years ago and academic conferences seem to all have accessibility guides.

The accessibility issues I ran into happened even though everyone I interacted with was kind and meant well. Many people helped me in different ways. But people’s good intentions and my positive attitude don’t make the world more accessible. As Stella Young put it in this fantastic TED Talk, “No amount of smiling radiantly is going to make a staircase turn into a ramp.”

Things started off a bit tricky, with a flight delay that caused me to arrive at my hotel after dark. With no natural light coming in, I bumbled around my hotel room, having to rely on the inadequate lamps. I have described before what I like to do when I first arrive in a hotel room to make it accessible; with it being dark outside, I wasn’t able to do everything I like to do until the next morning. Luckily, the room did have better-than-I’ve-come-to-expect lighting by the bed, but much of the room was just a shadow to me until morning and I have the bruises on my hip where I walked into the dresser to prove it.

The bigger challenge was navigating the conferences themselves. The first conference was an International Writing Centers Association event at DePaul University in a space that was well-lit, but the room numbers were tiny and hard to find. I had to walk up to each room’s door, locate the sign, and put my face an inch or two from the sign to find the room number. Luckily, other conference participants were kind about noticing my trouble and helping me find the rooms I needed; but the stress of frantically trying to find presentation rooms made me feel worn out by the time I got into the right rooms.

 The conference session themselves were excellent, but the accessibility was not. Despite the IWCA having a top-notch accessibility guide, speakers used the microphone and provided printed scripts in only one of the three sessions I attended. In the other two sessions, presenters had no handouts and did not use the microphone. One of these sessions was a roundtable in an auditorium, so the sound just disappeared into the ether. Normally I would have asked the speakers to use a microphone, but there was some confusion at the beginning of the session and by the time I realized speakers weren’t going to use the microphone, I would have had to interrupt the proceedings quite awkwardly. In hindsight, I wish I had done just that, but in the moment, I was discombobulated.

The second conference was the Conference on College Composition and Communication at the Hilton Chicago. I encountered so many unexpected steps and tripping hazards there that by the time I headed home, my neck hurt from looking down to watch my step. The room numbers were just as challenging to find as they had been at DePaul, with the added twist of seemingly random placement of room number plaques. At least at DePaul, all the room number plaques were to the right or left of the doors and looked similar; at the Hilton, some were to the left, some to the right, some above, and some I never found. Some plaques were electronic and others were not. Some had high contrast and some did not. Plus instead of room numbers, the rooms had names, so there was no internal logic; while I know room 5 is likely to be beyond room 4, where might the Lake Ontario room be in relation to the Buckingham room?

Finding room numbers was frustrating, but the surprise elevation changes with unmarked steps were truly treacherous. In one of the conference spaces, there were at least two little sets of 2-3 steps that almost killed me. Both were carpeted and blended in with the surrounding flooring. After almost tripping down each one, I turned to get a good look at them. One set did have a gray stair marker that I could see after the fact; the carpet was blue and gray, so the gray stair marker didn’t stand out and thus, didn’t really do the job it was supposed to do. This is a great example of focusing on legal compliance without considering the real purpose of accessibility: to make a space safe and navigable by a person with a disability.

I entered each room completely frazzled. Like the IWCA conference sessions, the Cs conference sessions were a mixed bag in terms of accessibility. Cs also has an excellent accessibility guide; still, speakers in only three of the four sessions I attended used the microphone and speakers offered scripts in only two of the four sessions. Slides in all the sessions were illegible to me, but I suspect part of that is because the projection screens were smaller than speakers may have anticipated and often positioned awkwardly so that not everyone in the room had a clear view of them.

Both of these conferences relate to literacy and the teaching of writing. The presenters are people who value reading and communication, and yet, clearly, a large proportion of them have not read the wonderful accessibility guides available to them.

My plea to people who give presentations:

  1. Read the accessibility guide. If the conference planners have created an accessibility guide, read it and follow the guidelines in it. If you don’t know how to do something the accessibility guide recommends that you do, learn how.
  2. Use a microphone. I understand why people don’t use a microphone. If you’re not used to speaking into one, it can feel awkward. But in 2023, if making presentations is part of your job, then you need to get comfortable using a microphone. Consider it part of your professional development.
  3. Create accessible slides. When you create your slides, assume that the presentation situation will be less than ideal: the room’s lighting won’t be great, the screen will be smaller than you’d like and farther away from participants than you’d like. And for the love of whatever you hold dear, please observe the rule of 5. Again, if you are not good at creating accessible slides, consider it part of your professional development to get good at it.
  4. Make a script available to participants. Yes, I know, it uses paper and is a bummer to have to have your presentation written up in advance rather than writing it feverishly the night before. Again, part of being an academic professional these days means making your materials accessible.
  5. Advocate for accessible conference spaces. If you have anything to do with planning a conference, ask pointed questions of the host facility about accessibility. How will folks who use wheelchairs access spaces? How will vision-impaired folks find rooms? How will hearing-impaired folks hear presentations? Where can folks go for a quiet space if they are over-stimulated? And have a back-up plan in case ASL interpreters call in sick or get stuck in traffic (this is another great reason for presenters to have scripts available).
Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety

Stop Shaming People Who Use Accommodations to Work Remotely

“Please make an effort.” “It would mean a lot to me if you were there in person.” “Make every effort to be there in person.” These are a few examples of the ablest and shaming rhetoric I’ve heard lately on campus about using accommodations to attend meetings remotely. My colleagues and I who have accommodations to attend meetings remotely are regularly asked to “make an effort” to attend face-to-face. The implication is clear: if you use your accommodation, you are not making an effort.

Campus leaders routinely engage in ableism, framing accommodations as attempts to not put in effort. I was recently in a meeting in which a colleague showed a video; as it began without subtitles, an attendee asked, “Can you turn the subtitles on?” The colleague said, “Can you just make an effort?”

Or using accommodations is framed as ruining everyone else’s fun, as in this example: A colleague described an icebreaker they had planned for a meeting that involved attendees doing some silly activities with a tight time limit. I asked, “What if some folks have accommodations for anxiety? Wouldn’t this ice breaker cause anxiety?” My colleague argued that the icebreaker was just for fun. For me, being humiliated by having an anxiety attack in from of my peers is not my idea of fun.

When people do use their accommodations, the culture of shaming can show up in disgruntled whispers of colleagues who ask incredulously, “What’s their disability?!” or comment, “I wish I didn’t have to attend in person!” or “It’s inconvenient for me, too, but I manage it.” These whispers are encouraged when the leader begins the meeting by saying, “That you all for making the effort to be here,” implying that folks who aren’t there didn’t make an effort.

I’ve written before about the challenges of getting documentation of a disability so I can get accommodations  and about why I don’t always ask for accommodations I am entitled to. The entire process of justifying accommodations is disempowering, humiliating, and time-consuming. Then, once a person goes through that process, they are shamed for using the accommodations.

On my campus, leaders regularly shame people who use their accommodations to attend meetings remotely instead of in person. Here are some examples of the shaming language I have heard lately:

What leaders say: “people are tired of remote meetings” or “staring at a screen is exhausting”

Translation: it’s your fault that people still have to attend remote meetings and be exhausted

But here’s the truth: many people dislike meetings whether they are remote or in person.

Here’s another truth: many people prefer remote meetings and are better able to engage when they can be home with their pets and/or children or in an environment they can control.

What leaders say: “I expect you to be there in person”

Translation: If you are not there in person, you are not meeting expectations. This echoes the language of evaluation in which people who are evaluated as doing their jobs poorly are rated “does not meet expectations.” Not meeting expectations is bad and shameful.

The truth: The expectations of leaders are often unreasonable and not grounded in the reality of workloads, bandwidths, and structural inequities.

What leaders say: “This is a reasonable expectation”

Translation: I have not done any research into this, but I strongly prefer in-person meetings and this is how we did things in the before-times and everyone was fine with it.

The truth: No, everyone was not actually fine with it. You didn’t ask or you weren’t listening or people didn’t feel empowered to speak up. Parents and other caregivers, people with disabilities and/or unreasonable workloads were not fine with it. I have never been fine with most in-person meetings, which are typically run badly and take me away from doing the meaningful work of teaching and research.

What leaders say: “The benefit of face-to-face meetings outweigh the convenience of attending from home via Zoom”

Translation: attending via Zoom is a mere convenience for people who are lazy, unmotivated, disengaged, and/or not prioritizing the important work that will happen at this meeting.

The truth: Accommodations are not about convenience, laziness, motivation, engagement, or priorities. Accommodations acknowledge differences in bodies and neurology. My glasses are technically an accommodation, not something I use because they are convenient or I am lazy. Glasses are commonplace enough that we don’t typically recognize them as an accommodation. Surely, a supervisor wouldn’t ban people from wearing glasses to a meeting. But if I ask for special lighting, I am likely to be told that there are others who will be bothered by that lighting. Why not let me attend remotely, then, so that I can control the lighting in my workspace without impacting others?

An anti-ableist alternative to all of these examples is to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all mode for meetings. We might even begin by evaluating whether a meeting we are planning is necessary. Once the specific purposes of the meeting are identified, a reasonable judgment can be made about whether the purposes will be undermined by remote attendance.

Any time a leader questions the legitimacy of an accommodation, they create a culture of ableism in which disability is seen as evidence that someone is “broken.”

Accessibility + Dis/ability

Disability = Normal. Disability ≠ Brokenness.

I’ve been very public with my vision issues and my recent experiences with anxiety. I do this to normalize disability. Living with disability is totally normal for me and for lots of other people. The most recent statistic I saw is that one in four adults in the U.S. has a disability at any given moment. The longer you live, the more likely it is that you will acquire a disability. My late husband is a great example: he lived without disability for decades and then when he was 60, he had a massive stroke that left him with multiple disabilities. He went from completely able-bodied to disabled in a split second.

Despite the fact that so many people are or will be disabled, we have a hard time as a culture understanding disability without judgment. The assumption that everyone is or should be able-bodied is called ableism and it is everywhere. I wrote about the challenges my late husband and I faced trying to get around downtown Denver when he was using a wheelchair last year. The restaurant that required wheelchair users to send a companion in to ask for help, wait for the right employee to materialize, get escorted around the building, and then traverse a large space in front of an audience had designed its entrance with the assumption that all patrons would be able-bodied.

I recently listened to a fantastic podcast on ableism. Glennon Doyle featured Carson Tueller on the July 27 episode of her podcast We Can Do Hard Things. The episode was titled “How to Love Your Body Now,” which is an idea that can apply to anyone, able-bodied or disabled. Carson Tueller, who was paralyzed from the chest down in an accident in 2013, told the story of how he came to accept, love, and feel at home in his body, recognizing it as “complete and enough.”

Tueller explains ableism as “the idea that there is such a thing as a good body and a disabled body is a broken version of a good body.” I like this explanation because of its use of the word “broken.” Something that is broken is damaged or ruined. We throw out things that are broken. When we understand some bodies as broken, we bring with us into that understanding the connotations of “broken”—that the body is ruined, it should be thrown out. The person living in the disabled body is seen as disposable. Unlovable. Unworthy.

Tueller shares that after his accident, he found a new way of thinking about his body. Instead of thinking of his body as broken, he thought, “My body now works differently.” That may seem like a small shift, but as Tueller explains, there is “no drama, no brokenness there” and that thinking of the accident as something that changed his life rather than as “a disaster that ruined my life” made it possible for him to see his body in its current state as complete rather than broken.

Notice that it’s not the injury or disability itself that causes the feelings of disposability or unworthiness—it’s the ableism that assumes a disabled body is broken. As Tueller says, “I can survive being paralyzed. I can’t survive feeling unlovable.” Tueller has found that living in a disabled body is quite wonderful (and I was thrilled to hear him disrupt the notion that disabled bodies aren’t sexy or that disabled people are asexual—he is having great sex).

When we assume that disability needs fixing, we convey that disability is a de facto problem, that something is wrong with people who have disabilities. There is nothing wrong with my eyes. My eyes can’t be wrong. Yes, my eyes function differently from lots of other eyes. But my frustrations with my vision are usually connected to something outside of me that could be fixed. For example, one of my most common challenges is not being able to read signs. Why is the assumption that my eyes are the problem rather than the poorly designed signs? I meet people all the time who can’t read street name signs, street numbers on buildings, and the like. Why not just make bigger signs or use a different font and make everything easier for everyone?

This idea that the problem is located in the person with the disability is ableism and it sneaks into our lives in insidious ways. In “Unlearning the Ableism of Cookbooks and Kitchen Wisdom,” Gabrielle Drolet brings attention to what she calls small-scale disability—”the little things that add up to make a life. Things like tying your shoelaces or braiding your hair or lighting a candle. Like turning on the faucets to wash your hands. Texting your friends. Cooking with ease.” The type of ableism Drolet identifies in cookbooks is less about brokenness and more about laziness. The cook who buys pre-ground pepper or uses paper plates is assumed to be lazy or wasteful. I was called wasteful when I bought two identical cutting boards, one in white and one in green, but with low vision, I can’t see the onion I’m cutting on a white board or the basil I’m cutting on a green board. The person who called me wasteful didn’t ask why I wanted two boards—they jumped straight to calling me wasteful.

Ableism is so deeply baked into our culture that during Disability Pride Month (July), someone asked me why anyone would take pride in being disabled. This was a person I know to be kind and generous. The question was a genuine one and grew out of the idea that being disabled equals being broken. Why take pride in being broken? To grasp taking pride in being disabled, you have to reject the idea that disability equals brokenness.

I am not broken. I do not need fixing. I love myself, my eyes, and even my anxiety. My low vision and anxiety are natural and normal. I refuse to be ashamed of them.

grieving

Say “uses a wheelchair” rather than “in a wheelchair”

After his stroke, my husband used a wheelchair to get around. The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side and although he was able to walk a few steps with a lot of effort and sometimes with assistance, getting around in a wheelchair was more efficient and less tiring.

More efficient and less tiring, but still a lot of work. The stroke destroyed a large portion of his brain and so he spent hours every week in physical therapy and then on his own working to retrain his brain to coordinate movements that used to come naturally and to recognize signals from parts of his body his brain had forgotten. To learn to sit upright in the wheelchair, he practiced sitting up straight in front of a mirror, developing core control, noticing when he was slumping to one side and using trial and error to activate the muscles necessary to straighten himself out. Once he was able to sit up straight in the chair, he had to learn how to get from the bed or another surface to the wheelchair, how to transfer his weight in ways that wouldn’t potentially cause a fall or injury, and how to work as a team with a person assisting him (that was usually me). He had to train his brain to remember to check that the chair’s brake was on or off and to make sure his paralyzed left arm wasn’t in a position where it could get tangled in the wheel or smashed against a wall if he rolled too close to it.  

To get around in the wheelchair, he had to learn to maneuver around people, objects, obstacles, pets, cords, divots in the sidewalk, and obstructions that a person with two functional legs could easily negotiate by straddling, hopping, or stepping over. The world is built for ambulation on two legs; successfully using a wheelchair to navigate a world not built for it is much more complicated than walking.

I know how much effort it took Tom to get around with the wheelchair and it makes me wince to hear that immense effort swept aside with a common phrase: “He’s in a wheelchair.”

My husband’s physical and occupational therapists, his doctors and nurses, his family and friends, used this phrase regularly. Every time I heard it, I winced a little. It minimizes everything about the human being sitting in the chair. It puts the focus on the machinery of the chair, perhaps the requirement of a caregiver or attendant. It renders invisible the person sitting in the chair.

Notice how differently these two sentences hit you:

  1. During the last year of his life, my husband was in a wheelchair.
  2. During the last year of his life, my husband used a wheelchair.

In the first sentence, my husband does nothing. There’s actually no action at all in the first sentence. Nobody does anything. It’s boring, implying a boring life and a boring person. If I were to follow this sentence with how much I loved him, you would have been prepared by the first sentence to hear my declaration of love as tinged with pity.

In the second sentence, my husband does something. There is action. He is the boss in that sentence. When I tell you after that sentence that I loved him, you’re much more likely to take it as a love that includes admiration, respect, and passion.

The simple word choice has an effect that ripples out to color the sentences that follow and impact your understanding of everything else I tell you about my husband.

When we say someone “is in a wheelchair,” we’re framing the wheelchair as a state of being, like being in a funk or in a mood. Conversely, when we say someone “uses a wheelchair,” we’re framing the wheelchair as a tool. Because the words we use impact the ways we see the world, a phrase like “in a wheelchair,” which obscures the agency of the person in the wheelchair, is a sneaky way ableism slides unnoticed into our speech and thus our worldview.

“In a wheelchair” implies that someone can’t do anything for themselves, that they are a burden with no agency. It erases all the hard work of navigating a world that is not designed for you. It is easier to leave someone out of an equation when we say they are “in a wheelchair.” On the other hand, “uses a wheelchair” acknowledges that a person can learn a new technology and navigate complex situations. Notice the difference between saying “we can’t hire someone in a wheelchair for this position” versus “we can’t hire someone who uses a wheelchair for this position.” In the first example, no further explanation is needed—of course you can’t hire someone who is a burden with no agency. But the second example does require at least a bit more explanation—why can’t someone who uses a wheelchair do this job?

I admit, I sometimes use this phrase. I’ve heard it so often that it occassionally rolls off my tongue without me even realizing I’ve said the dreaded phrase. But when the person in the wheelchair was the love of my life, whose effort was viscerally apparent to me, I learned how viciously unjust the phrase is. It sweeps aside all the effort, humanity, and agency of the person using the chair.

I know people who use this phrase are, like me, using it unreflectively. They are not issuing judgment on anyone. They mean no harm. They are speaking from a place of sympathy. But the language still does harm, whether the speaker intended it or not.

It’s a pretty easy switch to replace “in a wheelchair” with “uses a wheelchair,” and it will make a difference in how you see people who use wheelchairs.

grieving

Bursting into Flower in Slow Motion

I recently came across Muriel Rukeyser’s brief poem in response to Sylvia Plath’s death, “The Power of Suicide”:

The potflower on the windowsill says to me
In words that are green-edged red leaves :
Flower     flower     flower     flower
Today for the sake of all the dead      Burst into flower

I love the sentiment of living harder in honor of people who don’t live anymore. This is what I have been trying to do since my husband died 6 ½ months ago. My husband was known for living life to the fullest and when he passed away, I felt strongly that the most fitting way I could honor his memory would be to embrace life, have adventures, and bring joy to others. Although I have felt intense sadness, I’ve also felt intense happiness, sometimes at the same time.

Many times since my husband’s death, as I’ve navigated doing alone what I thought I’d have a partner along with me for, I’ve felt something like “bursting into flower,” although the phrases I’ve been thinking of are “blossoming,” “coming into myself,” and others that capture the slow, gradual nature of what seems to be happening.

Last week, I read an excerpt from Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which he observes, “If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.” That reminded me that the time that Tom has been gone—6 ½ months—is just a flash in the grand scheme of time, and that this blossoming that seems to be happening slowly, is, relative to “the history of our planet,” bursting into flower. So this week, I’ve been thinking of myself as bursting into flower in slow motion.

What isn’t possible one day often feels possible the next. One day, even looking at his clothes didn’t feel possible; a few days later, looking at them felt possible; a few weeks after that, moving them out of the closet felt possible. They are in the garage now, and one day, it may feel possible to give them away. The day I collected his ashes from the mortuary I carried the very heavy box around with me for most of the day; being apart from them felt impossible. The very next day, it was possible to leave them on my nightstand. One day I moved the box into a drawer. Over time, I’ve been able to scatter some of the ashes.

I wrote earlier this month about moving the glass of juice Tom drank the night before he died from the front of the fridge to the back. Today, I took a deep breath, excavated the juice glass from the back of the fridge, and moved it to the sink. It was gut wrenching—saying good-bye to the glass of juice is just another good-bye to Tom. The good-byes seem to keep coming. Good-bye to this mug of his and that book. Good-bye to the piece of paper he wrote on, good-bye to his hats, good-bye to his toothbrush. I have said good-bye to hundreds if not thousands of Tom’s things in these 6 ½ months.

This week it was the juice glass and a jar of pickles he bought at a farm market Lily and I took him to a month before he died. There will be something else next week or the following week. Or maybe it will be a few weeks or months before I am able to part with something else of his. Twenty years from now, looking back at these months, it will probably seem as if I got rid of things quickly, packing up Tom’s 61 years of life in a flash. The deliberation over each item, the stopping to dwell on a memory, the gentle interventions of the dogs to comfort me will all be erased and all that will remain is a line of my personal history: I packed up Tom’s things.

Somewhere in my personal history, it will read “After her husband died, she traveled to Europe and South America and Antarctica.” It will appear that I burst into flower, going from afraid to travel alone with my impaired vision to traveling the world in a flash. All my minor mishaps last week in Portland, Oregon, my first solo trip since Tom’s death, will be invisible. I did not burst into flower in Portland—I tripped off a curb into oncoming traffic, I wandered onto a construction site and had to be escorted off, I needed the help of multiple strangers to find and buy a cleaning cloth for my glasses when I got caught without one in a rainstorm and couldn’t tell the difference between the sidewalk and street.

One day, maybe when I am scattering some of Tom’s ashes at the tip of South America, a place he dreamed of riding his motorcycle to, I will remember how in the days after Tom died, the idea of traveling without him felt fantastical. I wasn’t sure I could ever find my way around an unfamiliar city on my own, navigating so many obstacles with my impaired vision. The mishaps in Portland will likely be condensed or maybe even forgotten, and I may think, “Here I am, on a continent Tom never made it to. Look at me, bursting into flower for his sake.”

grieving

Starting Points for Learning More about Disability and Accessibility

This week and next week my posts will be a little shorter than usual because of two activities that can take up a lot of time and energy for disabled folks and their caregivers: (1) arguing with doctors and insurance companies and (2) undergoing medical treatment. This week arguing is the big activity and next week it’s surgery. Ooops, did I say arguing? I meant advocating.

So far this week, I’ve logged about two hours each day arguing or doing research to support my arguments that my husband needs a particular appointment, medication, or treatment. A lot of it has been around getting my husband an orientation for his new motorized wheelchair, which we were told would automatically happen when the wheelchair was delivered. Instead, the wheelchair was dropped off, we were handed a manual, the headrest was adjusted, and that was it. The wheelchair is a very complicated machine and the manual is very dense. My husband’s disabilities make it hard for him to read. We’ve figured out a few of the features, mostly by trial and error, but I’m sure there are things we haven’t yet figured out. An ongoing issue is adjusting the foot rests, which are high enough that my husband accidentally smashed one into the oven door, breaking the door into a million little pebbles of glass. We obviously need the orientation!

For this week’s shorter post, I am sharing some of my favorite sources for folks who want to learn more about disability and accessibility in the classroom (and beyond). There are many brilliant people writing about disability these days (yay!) and my aim here is not to mention all of them. The sources I’m highlighting here are good ones, I think, for folks who are newish to thinking about disability and accessibility—in other words, these are some good starting points.

On the less scholarly side of things, here are my favorites:

On the more scholarly side of things, here are a few articles and books:

And some authors I recommend, in addition to the authors of the works I’ve noted above: