Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally

by Emily Ladau

Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live. — Neil Marcus, actor and playwright

But I struggle with the idea that acknowledging the existence of disability is somehow dehumanizing.

I’m not confined or bound to my wheelchair. It’s literally designed to enable me to move.

“ ‘Low functioning’ is used to deny agency to disabled people who have high support needs,” he states, “while ‘high functioning’ is used to deny resources to people who can mask their disability well. Any person’s support needs can shift from year to year, or even day to day, making ‘functioning’ a flawed concept.”

The services need to be in the community and not in an institution.”

“I always had this concept of myself, like maybe I was just a bad person,” she said. “People just didn’t like me and I didn’t understand why, so thinking I was a bad person was the logical progression for me. Neurodiversity gave me the ability to realize that that’s not the case. I just have a different kind of brain, but it’s morally neutral. There’s no good or evil involved.”

“The tragedy is not that we’re here, but that your world has no place for us to be.”

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.

To most of society, ableist beliefs and behavior don’t raise any red flags because they’re woven into the fabric of everyday life, simply accepted as the norm. For disabled people, though, ableism is always there—a part of our lives that never disappears, manifesting in endless forms ranging from broad, systemic discrimination to individual interactions.

But it’s pretty frustrating that disabled people have to fight so hard for something as basic as being able to order pizza.

Too many disabled people have been led to believe that our very lives are not worth living. And if there’s one thing—just one—that you take away from reading this book, let it be this: That line of thinking is unequivocally untrue. Disabled lives are worth living.

“I don’t personally like dismissing people for being ableist. It’s embedded in our culture, and I had to learn to be better, so how can I expect nondisabled people to know how to be better? What gets me is when people learn the harm they’ve caused, and double down about it.”

What people are really saying when they make excuses about accessibility is “Disabled people are unwelcome here.”

disabled people aren’t burdens. Rather, the burden is on us to navigate an inaccessible world.

the first step in fighting back against ableism is awareness.

I’m not broken and I don’t need prayers to be fixed.

When adults model stigma and discrimination or shame and ignorance, they’re perpetuating it into the attitudes and actions of future generations.

Indeed, the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous while being politically and socially erased.

We don’t need to prove anything to anyone. We, like all other people, disabled or not, are both capable and fallible, with many rocky layers in between.

Being an ally needs to be an ongoing process.

“True accountability is not only apologizing, but understanding the impacts your actions have caused on yourself and others and then making amends or reparations to the harmed parties,”

accountability and allyship are ongoing efforts.