By Zia Ravenscroft (he/they/it)
I’ve been using a cane as a mobility aid for nearly six months. Mine is bright pink, and gets me plenty of compliments from older women on the bus when I take one of the disabled seats. For about a month after I began walking with one, I swear every time I saw someone the first thing they asked was ‘What happened?’ There never felt like there was an easy way to say that nothing happened, really. I’m just disabled, and it took me far too long to realise this, and even longer to do anything about it.
My official disability is a combination of chronic fatigue, pain, and joint disorders. There’s not one specific cause for any of this. This often confuses able-bodied people. They want an easy story, an easy answer, something that can be cured and then forgotten about, instead of continuing to have to think about mine and so many other’s disabled existences. I have days where I cannot get out of bed or move around my flat without using my cane. I avoid stairs where possible, which is difficult in this hilly bitch of a city. I can still cut a gay walking speed on a good day, but I’m more used to my friends striding off ahead of me.
Since I was sixteen, I’ve experienced pain and fatigue near-daily that worsens in peaks when I ignore my body’s limits and push myself beyond them. I survived this for years by simply not even noticing it. When all you know is your own supposedly normal experience, it’s hard to imagine anything else. It wasn’t until last summer, when I spent nearly a week in bed (partly from illness, mostly from sheer disabled exhaustion) on a family holiday, that my cousin suggested, perhaps, Zia, not everyone experiences this level of pain and fatigue as constantly as I did. This felt mind-blowing. It shouldn’t have been. I felt a lot of grief over not taking care of myself sooner, but promised I would from now on.
Once you start paying attention to your body, it’s hard to stop. I might have only begun thinking of myself as disabled earlier this year, but it’s entirely how I experience my body in the world now. When I talked to my parents about my disabilities, my mother asked when I would get better. I probably won’t. I need care, not a cure. I still try to not feel guilty over saying no to plans with friends because I cannot physically handle more than one activity in the day, and letting myself rest as much as I actually need to.
If anyone hasn’t confronted disability in their own lives, it’s something people are very detached from, though we are all at most temporarily able-bodied. We are all pre-disabled. The notion of a liveable life is always connected to an able body. Yet, I am disabled and my life is liveable—and I refuse for it to be anything but.
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