Painful labels they’d carried around inside themselves for years suddenly didn’t seem as relevant: it wasn’t that they were stupid, or clueless, or lazy, they were just disabled. It wasn’t that their efforts had never been enough, or that they were fundamentally wrong or bad. They simply hadn’t been treated with the compassion they deserved, or given the tools that would have allowed them to flourish. Naming their position in society as a disabled person helped them to externalize that which had long been internalized. It proved that none of their suffering had been their fault.
