A good story always starts with an introduction and a setting:
In my senior year of high school, I became an activist for disabled rights. Senior year was a breakthrough for me because I had finally accepted who I was instead of pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Despite finally being proud of myself, I started to face more issues based on my new self-confidence; such as one particular interaction with a classmate, Olivia (whose name we changed for privacy reasons).
Olivia and I had a class together. The classroom setting was laid-back and open-minded, so we often (over) shared our personal experiences, and educated each other on how to fix problems with our society. One day we discussed ableism and disability, and Olivia went wild when I began to speak.
Since I was young, I had a leader attitude. I always knew what to say, how to word it, and who to direct it to; and it gave me a lot of confidence when speaking about my political beliefs, or controversial views. The class took a bit of a negative twist one day: we were discussing cures and medicine. One student proposed in their perfect idea of the future, we would have no disabilities, no sickness, and no issues. Confused as to why anyone would want to get rid of disabilities (as a disabled person myself, and proud to be one) I raised my hand and in a roundabout way gave a testimony.
“I wasn’t deaf since birth.” I spoke, and I could feel the person sink into their seat, “I lived more than half of my life wishing there was a cure for my deafness so that I could be like you.” The class listened, but Olivia listened harder. As I spoke about how curing things such as autism, paralysis, etc. could be beneficial to some, that others may see it as a way to wipe out diversity and appeal to the “perfect” image of America (which I’ll leave up to you to interpret how I meant that). I asked if they would personally cure my disability, if I was alive in their perfect world. This began the Olivia driven attack, that I never intended to bring upon us. Olivia began to go on about how beautiful I was, and inspiring, and to “cure” me was taking away my beauty. I was taken aback by that, because I liked to believe that I was beautiful to begin with- and that my confidence within myself was why I appeared so brave and inspiring; not my deafness. After the discussion, Olivia turned to me and asked:
“I didn’t even know you were deaf! How can you speak so good if you can’t hear?”
I answered her question short and simply because I was in too much of a bad mood from her ableist interjection to give a sweet response. I admit, I let the way she spoke about me get to me, but I was too nice to tell her that it wasn’t her place. I still to this day say that it’s my fault she got out of hand.
As the class went on, we discussed issues more often and Olivia kept asking questions. They started innocent, like if I knew sign language, and what my favorite sign was: but they slowly took a very weird turn.
“What’s the benefit to your disability?” she asked. I stared at her waiting for her to laugh at my reaction. The question brought back all the toxic insecurity I once held deep within myself years prior. I began to think: Is there a benefit to this? Not being able to hear correctly is a curse! If I was able-bodied I wouldn’t be in this situation. What’s the benefit to this? She asked me if I heard her, and I nodded.
“I don’t really know how to answer that.” I said with a nervous chuckle, expecting her to shake off the question and move on to her homework; but she continued to wait for a response. “Oh, you’re serious.”
Olivia stared at me while I thought again, with this grin across her face. She gave off the impression that I was teaching her to be disabled, so she could while I was sleeping creep her way into my skin and take over my life as a disabled person. I knew she couldn’t do that, but the thought of her imagining herself disabled gave me enough nightmare fuel to last months. I wondered why Olivia thirsted so much for oppression, because she often said white people were being oppressed, or that feminists were oppressing men. To be quite honest, for the longest time I thought she was trolling us all; even now, as I write this, I still question if I fell for a troll trap.
I managed to avoid her question, and gave a no-effort response. She seemed to notice that that was all she was getting out of me from that, and moved on. Her questions got worse after that. Day after day, I dreaded going to that class because Olivia would wait patiently for me to sit down, and bombard me with questions. I also have to admit some days I would take my hearing aids out, or turn them off, or even pretend I didn’t hear her to make her go away. One day, we talked about sign language in class and how if we want to learn cultures we need to understand how the language helps their culture. My teacher, who I love, asked me if sign language was an aid in deaf culture; I explained how sign language was not only ASL, but many different languages and it didn’t just help deaf people. I look over at Olivia, who is listening with so much interest that it’s scary. She seemed to be waiting for me to be silent so she could interject: and my thought was right.
“American Sign Language is always changing! Andi can tell you! The culture changes too, I read that hard of hearing people are now choosing to be called deaf because they don’t like it anymore.”
“That’s- not what they’re doing.” I responded, and I could tell the tension was growing. I was sick of letting her ableist comments slip by, and I wasn’t being an activist by letting her get away with it, “Some of us ditched the term “hard of hearing” because it promoted the idea that some people with hearing loss could regain their hearing back or be cured. People with permanent hearing loss will not get their hearing back, and some of us just prefer to be called deaf. It also has been shown, unfortunately, that when someone says they’re deaf they get more accessibility than they would if they said hard of hearing.” Olivia loved this, and continued to interject as if she knew about my own culture more than me. I continued to correct her.
After that class period, like most days, she followed me and asked more questions. She one day told me she got into an argument with her cousin over what the sign for “thank you” was. Olivia proudly declared that the sign of “F-You” was “thank you” because she had a “deaf friend, so she knew the real sign”. I found it ironic that she was still wrong, and I never taught her any signs. She’d show me PSE videos and ask me to translate them for her (I don’t know a lot of ASL, and I definitely don’t know PSE.)
One day, I found out she used the R-Slur very shortly after she told me she never uses it.
I almost drew the line there, and confronted her on ableism, but she somehow managed to shock me once more before I graduated.
It was about a week or so before graduation, so everyone in our class was preparing for that or getting ready for the massive final. Olivia wanted to go to college and graduate early, so she spent her free time finding colleges across the country that were affordable and gave her the degree she needed for her dream job. She and I discussed scholarships, and she asked if I could use my disability as means to get college money.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to.” I said, “I don’t really wanna feel like I’m using my disability as a way to get free college. You know? I worked so hard with it during regular school, I can work twice as hard in college and still come out confident and fine. Besides, I’m not getting a PHD or anything, so it doesn’t matter.”
She found that interesting and asked what other scholarships I can apply for. I told her that she could easily apply for any scholarship she wanted, women in STEM was a good one especially since that was the field she was in. However, she managed to find one I wished didn’t exist.
“Andi, can you help me with a scholarship?” She asked me one day. I thought Why me? but I asked her the prompt and she replied, “It’s for activists of disabled people, and I need to interview a disabled person for it.”
At first, I wasn’t too mad. I questioned why she would consider herself an activist, especially since she never did anything for disabled people. She didn’t offer to help the disabled students and she never helped spread accessibility throughout the school (we definitely needed that). However, I chose to let it slide, because I knew she was at least interviewing me for the prompt and that I would at least be confident in knowing she got scholarship money and was kind enough to ask me for help. I was so, so wrong.
She walked over and handed me the laptop. In front of me was a screen that read “I AM ABLE.”
Shocked, and angrily intrigued, I read more.
“I AM ABLE. #WEAREABLE — One of my SPECIAL ABILITIES is: ________ — Why does that make me special?”
I gasped. I made an actual noise, and she smiled. “I know, isn’t it super cool?” she asked.
“Is this a joke, Olivia?” I asked. She shook her head. “You honestly thought I’d do this?”
There was a silence, and everyone in the room was curious.
“I am not abled, though.” I said, “This has to be a scam, I don’t have any SPECIAL abilities, and I am not abled. I am disabled. This is disgusting. I’m sorry if this makes you upset, but I’m not going to let you use me for that. My disability is not your scholarship opportunity.”
She apologized for making me upset, and went back to her seat. She went on for about five more minutes to her seat partners (who were my friends) about how she didn’t know any other disabled people and she didn’t know who to ask. She very obviously wanted to use my disability as a means for her money.
I want to use this story as a way to explain to able-bodied people that disabled people are people and we have emotions. Please do not use us as means to gain popularity, money, “brownie points”, etc. Treat us like the human beings that we are. I couldn’t help but think how insulted someone else in the community would feel if Olivia asked them the same thing.
