Invisible Disabilities: Labels

I live with disabilities. I am disabled. I'm a person with disabilities.  Any of those work. Some people prefer one over the other. I don't care (Just don't call me differentially or differently abled. I don't like that one). There's more—my disabilities are invisible. My body is visually intact, and no different than the standard normally abled human body. Outside of the fact that I like to talk about, and normalize, living with disabilities, you would never know—

I park my car in a disabled spot because I need it. I climb out just like anyone else, walk in my heels, carry my child, walk around the store looking "just fine", and walk back to my car like it's just another Tuesday for a textbook human body. I still need my disabled spot. If I didn't have my disabled spot, I would not be able to do all of those other things I did. It's important I get to do those things, because to me, those things make life seem like life.

My disabilities don't stay the same everyday. Some days are good and some days are limiting, and some days are truly debilitating. I have learnt over the years, very much the hard way, that I need to give my body some space and grace for doing the best that it can to meet my very high standards. I have learnt it. But I'm still angry about it.

Labels are hard.

I struggle with labels. I don't like them. Not even a little. It's because they make me feel restricted, trapped and like I'm expected to conform to certain standards, forever. Because labels are forever, right? And, labels have rules, right? Disabled means I need a wheelchair, or a cane, or an assistive device of some sort that's an overt expression of the limitations of my body, correct? I have other labels I attach to myself: Lazy means I have the means to do a task, I just choose not to do it. Stupid means I am not smart enough to solve a problem. Idiot means stupid people are smarter than I am. Useless means I bring no value to the household. So on and so forth.

I dislike labels bitterly.

But "Disabled" has helped me. It wasn't easy to accept. I thought I was an imposter: I'm not disabled. I'm just lazy and not strong enough. I'm a scientist though. I had to face the facts here:

• Fact 1: walking from the parking lot to my office was so hard I would end up on the floor by my desk, curled into a ball, and crying to myself for a few minutes because I hurt so much.

• Fact 2: over the course of a work day, I had to pause, breathe and cry for a little while multiple times to deal with the pain.

• Fact 3: I was having multiple panic attacks a day.

• Fact 4: I was celebrating things like walking around a park with my toddler, or taking him to zoo.

• Fact 5: I had to pause while putting my clothes on, or brushing my hair.

The list went on and I wrote them all down.

At first, discovering I am disabled wasn't any better than thinking I was just lazy and weak. My rationale was that "lazy" and "weak" could be fixed. But if I'm disabled, what am I going to do? It's the sort of logic that gets us stuck in ruts. But as I leaned into it I learned that understanding my body is disabled opened up a whole world of solutions for me. It gave me ways in which I could support my body so it wasn't expending so much energy on unimportant things, leaving energy for me to use for the important ones. I could park in a disabled spot, for instance. It was much closer to my office and saved me a lot of pain and stress. Labels are hard, but when used right, they are extremely helpful.

Today, I'm still figuring out ways in which I can support my body so we can be on the same page, so that it doesn't feel like we're pulling each other in opposite directions, and so that there is more joy and less bitterness in my relationship with it. It's a journey we're on together, somewhat awkwardly and mostly unsynchronized, but we're getting there. Good job, body!