Ableds Are Weird and So Was I

(Both abled and weird)

Two of my extended family members (but not on the same side of my family) were born without forearms—let’s call them Bjorn and Gyda (yes, I’m rewatching season 1 of Vikings at the moment, how could you tell?)

A few years ago, I was visiting Bjorn’s grandparents. For some unknowable reason, in the middle of one of our conversations, I felt the need to mention Gyda. Not that I actually knew Gyda. She’s my second cousin’s cousin—I knew of her existence through Facebook photos on his profile, but no more. I’ve never met her, or talked to her. I basically haven’t the faintest idea who she is or how she deals with her disability. And yet I mentioned her, like, “hey look, this is neither here nor there and doesn’t help anyone at all, but I know another person with the exact same condition.”

The Office That Tried Its Best to Be Accessible

Once upon a time, I left my house every day to go to work—an actual desk job in an actual office. It should not come as a surprise to any of you who live in today’s society that this building was not accessible. It was not the day I started the job, April 27, 2015, and it was not on the day I left, September 13, 2019. “But it was so much better then!” my abled coworkers would protest. “See, we installed an accessible toilet!”

As you will see in this article, that wasn’t enough.

You think you’re complimenting us, but…

Able-bodied people are not disabled.

Did I just blow your mind?

If you can walk without any problems, you will never know what it’s like to be a (full-time) wheelchair user. If you can see, you don’t know what it’s like to be blind. And so on and so forth. You can imagine—and you probably do, because I think it’s human to imagine and empathize—, but you’ll never know.

This can lead to ableds telling us disabled people things they think that, were they disabled like us, they would like to hear, except… they probably wouldn’t, and so we don’t either. In this article I’ve noted a few compliment-attempts-that-come-out-wrong that I’ve been the recipient of before (if not in those exact words, in the sentiment expressed). I’ve tried to explain them so that if you’re able-bodied, you’ll hopefully understand what I mean when I say you’re not being as nice as you think you are.

A Short Glossary of Disability

When I started working for a tour operator, I had a whole new lingo to learn, that of travel, tourism and airplanes. Each one of my areas of study – biology, translation and publishing – came with a vocabulary I had to master. For each of my interests, I have a set of words to get to know.

And the same goes for when I joined the online disabled community, there were lots of terms that were new to me that I had to learn to be able to join conversations without sounding like a total newbie. Some of them I now use a lot, and you’ll probably come across them on this blog, if you haven’t already, so I thought I’d write up a quick glossary of all these new terms!

It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do

If every disabled person got a nickel every time they were called brave or courageous for simply living, and then we all got together, we could probably buy an island, make it totally accessible and live there forever.

Yet when we confront ableds about this, they always protest that it was meant as a compliment, it wasn’t insulting! All right, if you say so. But hey, just for fun, let’s look up some definitions of courage, shall we?

Opening Doors and Car Trunks

I’m Canadian; holding open doors for the people following us is something of a national sport. Sometimes, it can be very useful for me. If I’m walking into a building that has no automatic doors. If the door is heavy and I’m struggling with my walker. If the door is set in a small, closed-in place in which it would be a hassle to maneuver my walker around to have space to open it.