I’ve always found it funny that every disability has it’s own set of stigmas, that the able bodied people of the world are so terrified of breaking down the wall and asking about disability that they just decide to make up things about disabled people.
An example of this the strange belief that asking someone with a speech impairment to repeat themselves is incredibly rude and makes you a terrible person. This is clearly untrue and to be perfectly honest, stupid. I’m perfectly aware that my speech sounds different but because I always know what I’m saying I need to rely on the people around me to tell me if they can’t understand me. You wouldn’t understand the level of annoyance it gives me when I’m speaking to someone and I know they don’t understand what I’m saying yet they just respond with a “yeah”.
Another odd stigma that surrounds disability is that people is that able bodied people think they can get away with saying some genuinely awful and inappropriate things like “if I were you I’d kill my self, I don’t know how you do it” which is outrageous and makes me wonder how the person saying that would react if a disabled person said that to them. Other things people say around disabled people which they really shouldn’t include “Your pretty for a disabled person’ my response to that is always “your pretty for someone so ignorant”. I think the loss of a filter around disabled people is most likely a result of miseducation and stress over the fact that they have never spoken to an actual disabled person before.
One of the funniest misconceptions about disabled people is that we have really sad lives. I understand the origins of the assumption and it makes sense that people would think that being disabled is difficult because it is, but I hate how people assume that just because I’m in a wheelchair my life is miserable. When in reality, my life is pretty great, people are always shocked when I tell them about all my hobbies and ambitions. I think this is a form of ableism that’s always overlooked and people really need to pay more attention to the way that they view our lives.
These are just small insights into some of the misconceptions about disability but there are so many out there. The moral of this blog post is that whether you are disabled or not, you should never make assumptions about a disabled person, asking and communicating is always the key.