[Image description: The photograph shows the author and her kid at this year’s Pride parade in Santa Cruz, CA. Rachel is standing on the right wearing a blue t-shirt, black pants, and a scarf decorated in rainbow-colored stars. She is a middle-aged white woman with short greying hair and glasses, and she is holding a water bottle. To the left is Rachel’s kid, who is wearing a pink t-shirt, a red sweatshirt tied around their waist, and black pants. They are a white, non-binary person wearing a grey cap with sunglasses attached to the front of their t-shirt. Behind the two figures are others in the parade, along with a rainbow flag.]

Last year, on National Coming Out Day, I officially came out as bisexual. It was a celebration. No angst. No fear. No second thoughts. Just a celebration.

It was a such a contrast with coming out as disabled at the end of 2008, with all of the fear and dread that attended that decision. There have been many times since then that I’ve thought that coming out as disabled was the worst decision I’d ever made in my life. If I could have put the toothpaste back in the tube at those moments, I would have.

Of course, I’m a few years down the road now and feel much more comfortable, proud, and confident. But oh, what a process! And of course, the process never ends. I always have internalized shame, and hatred, and fear to root out of my head. And I still have to deal with a world of people who don’t understand the physical and social experience of disability. But in general, I navigate these waters much better than I did at the outset.

It’s very difficult to come out as disabled, I think, because we face the dual reality that most people a) hate our bodies absolutely unapologetically and b) consider that hatred entirely natural. It’s for this reason that they can use disability slurs constantly and think nothing of it. It’s for this reason that they can segregate and exclude us as though we’re substandard merchandise to return to the manufacturer. It is still considered natural to react with revulsion against us in a way that other groups have fought against more successfully — not entirely successfully, obviously, but more successfully.

Partly, we face this hatred because our culture worships control and denies the fragile and ever-changing life of the body. Partly, we face this hatred because the medical model has taken over as a metaphor for human life. People are no longer evil. People no longer make bad choices. People are no longer victimized by oppression. People no longer act out of ignorance, or selfishness, or greed. No. Now they’re sick, crazy, brain-dead, retarded, mentally ill, have low IQs, and on and on.

In the face of this hatred, it’s very, very difficult to convince people that you love your disabled body because it’s the one you live in. You say that you love your body, and people look at you as though you don’t quite understand your own reality.

My body hurts a lot these days. But I still love it. It’s the body I was born with. It enables me to experience life. Without it, I’d have no life at all. I might not love every sensation in my body, but I love my body, even on the hardest days, because it gives me life.

[Headline image: The graphic shows the head of a white person without the face visible. A large question mark appears in the center, with brown hair along the left and right of the head.]

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This post first appeared on the author’s Disability and Representation blog and is reprinted by permission.