Depending on who you are, the word special will mean different things to you. Maybe it means a special day that’s particularly joyful or a special offer at a favourite shop. To me, the word special is damaging, much like being called an inspiration, the word special is yet another term that able bodied people use to make disabled people more palatable to their positivity hungry society.
When I was younger, I loved being called special because it meant I would get attention and as I’ve said before, I loved attention. Now, I see being called special as a bad thing. it means that people don’t feel comfortable talking about disability and would much rather just act like it was some kind of personality trait that they can slap a pretty sounding label on and forget about. I think it’s particularly harmful for younger disabled kids to be hearing, especially before they have started school because once a child is told that they’re special, they start othering themselves from their peers and it creates unnecessary social boundaries. If you are told that you’re just ‘special’ and not taught about real labels like ’disabled’ it also means that in later life, you might not understand that you are disabled and as a result of that, you won’t be able to access the help available to you because you’ve internalised that you’re just ‘special’. It’s a problematic cycle of able bodied people trying to make disabled people as ‘normal’ as they can, and ultimately it does much more harm than good.
Contradictory to this entire post, I don’t actually think that the term ‘special’ is always bad. It’s certainly able bodied jargon but for some disabled people who might be coming to terms with their disability, the word could make them feel less ‘broken’ as that is definitely the other end of the spectrum of language used for disabled people, so clearly the word isn’t always terrible.
It’s definitely a word with mixed connotations and strong feelings either way but surely in 2021, the people who have the disabilities should be creating their own labels and deciding what makes them comfortable instead of what they are told they are.