Thursday, 10 May 2012

I Am the Perfect Chameleon . . . .

I came across this post in a forum on Facebook, and was given permission by the author to post it on my blog.
On reading it, I felt it expressed every feeling of outrage I've had in my life over the disadvantages we, the disabled, have to put up with.
Rebecca's words are heart-felt, honest, and full of that same outrage, but there's no way I could have expressed this in such brilliant terms:


Rebecca Stell – I am the perfect Chameleon.

(Posted: 10/05/12. 19:39:00)

I am the perfect chameleon, a grey colour from standing in the shadows for too long, being the sort of disabled person society decided it wanted me to be, whatever that is THIS week, but now I am ready to SHOUT.

We have let authority tell us where to go and what to accept, and who to be, and when to play a minor (VERY minor) role for too long.

I struggled to achieve what able-bodied kids without brain damage did, and was STILL told that I had 'let the school down' by failing to get more than a 'D' for GCSE Maths, despite the miracle that seemed to me, a kid with specific learning difficulties, who expected a U.

To say we slog our guts out, for things others take for granted, is an understatement, and it has left more than one of us with clapped out endocrine systems.

But, at least thirty years ago, we would have been cheered for protesting 'in spite of' our disabilities. At least as children under Thatcher, it seemed our parents were prepared to accept OUR best efforts, even if teachers pushed us 'til the pips squeaked. Now, however, the neo-Thatcherites have moved the goalposts, and from being told we must 'accept our disability' and try to 'fit in' 'despite our limitations' (it never quite worked, but we mustn't complain or draw attention to our disability), and that we are really just the same as normal people, we are now being told that our best is not good enough, that only our productivity will do, that we are costly, unaffordable, unappealing and undateable (thank YOU Channel Four) and we REALLY DON'T FIT IN.

Apparently that they did not mean it, when they said that our DLA was for life, or that our disabilities entitled us to support, apparently, we can still have C.P., or M.S. or Crohns, but we must be fit to work. The criteria we must fulfil is not a disability but a tick-box system, a dodgy arm here, a clicky hip there, an unbending knee, a mental illness that will magically mend in three months, or six, or eighteen.

We have, instead of our disabilities, an assessment framed for a medical model that takes no account of the fact that we must live our lives WITHIN a society, a society of scrounger-hunters, that is allowed to judge whether we are 'real' or 'fake', without even the evidence that we take to an ATOS assessment - a tome that is usually a three volume epic, thirty years in the making, (Editions NHS) and that needs hefting in a wheelbarrow.

We are the women who think we are 'standing unaided to wash up’, when, on reflection, we realise that we prop our tummies against the worktop to balance there, and save the cups. We are the innocents who thought that we imagined it when voices rose two octaves to aid our understanding, the women wise men run from when they spot our sticks or lurching gait, and others grab at for an ego boost as, 'my disabled girlfriend' (actual name unknown).

Where is the Germaine Greer of disability politics, the Rebecca West of Disability identity, who can forge meaning out of our attempts to fight back, and a language of polemic for Spartacus to shout from?

The lessons of feminism are too good to waste on just women. A manifesto for disability is most assuredly NOT just for 'the real disabled', 'the most vulnerable' or the 'people like you who have a right to support'.

I know what it is to be both one of the 'genuinely disabled' to the bus driver on the outgoing journey, and 'one of those scroungers' on the return ticket. I am that 'amphibious thing'* unappealing to editors, in that we don't 'look that disabled', but we are the subtleties behind the stereotype, the proof that they lied when they said they weren't coming after 'genuine disabled people'.

Our brown envelopes, and the bile of the Mail's trolls are the vindication of the lies they told us for 30 odd years, that our support, too, would be 'cradle to grave'.

Cheered or booed, we aren't going to be talked down to any longer.

Our inner Pankhurst’s have risen. The solidarity learnt in feminism or civil rights, and the anger generated by years of silence, is too good to waste on cracking up over some untrained medical professional's computer-generated opinion.

Ten years ago we would have called being left out of the Levenson Enquiry discrimination, now we're too afraid to call it what it REALLY is, but we're going to fight them on the beaches, with all the clichés at our command. 

This, girls and boys, is when we start to SHOUT!


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