International Day of People with Disability
Far Out! There’s soooo many “days” for different things, eh?! Sometimes I feel a bit like it’s just a crazy way we’ve given every advocacy group or cause a piece of the action, a voice on the soap box…. And sometimes these days come along and hit a personal nerve for me… and this one has!
Having lived with chronic illness and chronic pain for most of my adult life, I’ve recently been grappling with the space between trying to find “solutions” to “fix” my problem with pain and accepting the limitations I live with and loving myself for my abilities. I know my unconscious ableism really impacts on how I live with and accept my levels of ability and disability.
Click here to hear about my journey
And just as a bit of an aside, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how much we define people as being “normal” or not… and how that unconscious sense of success or failure is imbued into so much of what we do. A couple of things which have got me thinking:
My teen daughter and I watched an episode of ABC’s “You Can’t Ask That” about Intersex people recently. I was challenged deeply by the stories of the questions and assumptions these people had lived with most of their lives because of people’s narrowly defined ideas about what is “normal”.
An incredible and challenging book, “Far From the Tree” by Andrew Solomon which poses the most complex of questions: “Sometimes your child - the most familiar person of all - is radically different from you. The saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But what happens when it does?”* He interviews hundreds of people, exploring the families of kids with stigmatized conditions. It reminds me of how much parenting is a an ongoing invitation to re-work our own assumptions and personal identities. I’d highly recommend it if you haven’t read it.
Gingerbread Houses - Yup!! Specifically, how we so often think of GOOD as being “picture perfect” and we represent to children what things “Should look like”. These subtle unconscious messages we give out every day, continue to propel our world along a path of “normal is good”, “different is a failure”. Watch this space for my upcoming “Imperfectly Perfect” Gingerbread House workshops… They’ll be an antidote to such unhelpful thinking.
*https://www.penguin.com.au/books/far-from-the-tree-9780099460992
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