Is Disability Cool
Ten days ago, the Telegraph published Poppy Coburn’s opinion piece about how “disability became cool”. I haven’t ever really been cool, so I read on with eager expectation. Poppy dashed my dreams. I am not cool; however, young women with mobility aids who post on Instagram are. In fact, they are so cool that young women are choosing to follow them into the disabled lifestyle.
Unsurprisingly, there has been an angry online backlash directed at the ableist and clearly privileged white middle-class Poppy. It is well deserved; the hypothesis that a life on disability benefits is a lifelong holiday is a trope that refuses to die. Poppy knows that disability gives a life trajectory of poverty and neglect by social safety nets; she is well aware that PIP isn’t an out of work payment, and she is cognizant of the non-existent rate of fraud that runs alongside the massive underclaiming of the benefits that are available.
The number of disabled people rising isn’t a sign of people dropping out of society to scrounge a lifelong holiday off everyone else; it is a sign of keeping good stats and a society that is literally crippling its members. A broken society breaks people; something Poppy, who is doing quite nicely, doesn’t want to understand. Let the wilful spite, hatred and ignorance commence.
I don’t want to go into a detailed takedown of Poppy, her “article” and the righteous anger that has resulted because I am not angry at Poppy and the people who think like her and support punching down on the most vulnerable in society; I am heartbroken and tired. There is no fighting people who want to hate. They started in school; they may have picked on “fatty”, “four eyes”, the quiet one, the ones they could hate later because they are neurodivergent, or they could have gone for the racist angle. They are exposed to all the information they need not to be that way, and they choose the path of bigotry and hatred. You are not like them, so they want to cause you harm, at the very least and want you dead at the worst. Sadly, we have seen that play out over and over again.
Part of me feels sorry for these people; how petty and small must their life be that they think a disabled person has it better. What mental hellhole have they dug for themselves? They aren’t thinking in the philosophical sense of the word; their hatred isn’t rationalised; it’s a simpler, primitive violence. The same violence that chooses war over cooperation. It is why there are mass graves next to villages where those that had good farming land were invaded and axed or clubbed so that people could have what they didn’t have.
In one sense, I may well have something they don’t; I have a stable income, and I get a car to use. Society is shitting on them, and they think it is shitting on us disabled people less. What they miss is that our bodies and the structures of society are shitting on us constantly. I haven’t always been disabled; I remember being able to get up, shower and have breakfast to get ready for the day. Those things are not restorative now; they don’t prepare me; they are exhausting activities that I need to recover from. I have a shower before bed because it can make me too tired to do anything else. The able-bodied, rich or poor, don’t have to dose their day out. They aren’t timing medications to facilitate getting some groceries. The disabled and able-bodied can do the same thing, like reading, but it takes a very different physical toll on the disabled person.
I would be happy to trade my disabled life and all its “benefits” for my health and fitness back. Disabled people don’t choose the disabled life, and when we are online, we are talking to people like us, encouraging and supporting. We are not inspiration porn for the able-bodied; we are visibility for a marginalised and maligned group of people who don’t have a voice and face literal and metaphorical insurmountable barriers to participation in society.
No employer is going to give me a job; my health is too unreliable; so here is a fact that Poppy chooses not to see: that disabled people do not have the option to work our way out of our situation. We don’t have Poppy shaped choices to make. Instead, we are stuck in the immediacy of managing our disability, our health and our wellbeing in the present. We are fighting a medical system that gaslights us, lies to us, and denies us the treatment their own guidelines and policies say we should get. It’s an endless, debilitating battle not because we are choosing to opt out of society, but for the complete opposite reason; we want to have fulfilling lives where we contribute and the opportunity to work ourselves into lives that we want and have chosen.
Maybe I am a little bit angry at Poppy and what she represents in a year that feels very personal in how it has attacked disabled people. This “affair” has got me thinking more about the actual challenges that I face and, more importantly, how I tackle them. I don’t have answers; that’s not how life works. What I do have is the start of an idea. Previously, I would focus on a concrete achievement, a qualification, a win, something with a defined outcome. In terms of my creative endeavours, I haven’t questioned that approach. I am going to publish my poetry, a simple tick in the box. The thing is, when I tick that box, so what? I thought back to sitting in the airport after winning my European title (humble brag, I know!) and thinking that absolutely nothing in my life or the world had changed. I had achieved what had been deemed impossible after my bilateral patellar tendon rupture. The medical goal was to walk without crutches, and there I was. That’s the stuff of documentaries with uplifting music.
But it wasn’t, and I thought, that’s the thing: you climb the mountain, and the world carries on regardless of whether you succeed or fail. It only mattered to me. Today, whether I write a poem, publish, have a collection, make a zine, only matters to me. Achieving a tick-box goal, while great, doesn’t change a thing. So, my focus had to change; after my “crisis of metrics”, I saw that chasing numbers broke me. I had to fall in love with being a poet. Letting go of shiny milestones is difficult; the task ahead of me is to embrace and accept the person I want to become. The process is bigger than just poetry; it is the process of becoming itself.
I expect this to be a process of little things. I overthought using a planner; that rests on me becoming the sort of person who uses a planner effectively, enjoys the process of planning and benefits from the process of planning. To become enraptured with the process of becoming is to expand that project to be the sort of person who is creative. A challenge when I am still learning who I am.
That is the magic of it. From managing disability to becoming the person I want to be, it’s a life’s work.
