5 Approaches to Take to Accept Your Disability
On a blue background within the purple swiggly lines is the title “5 Approaches to Take to Accept Your Disability” in purple outline.
Accepting your disability is a process. It is uniquely your experience. It depends on when you gain your disability, how it was obtained, what interactions you have with the disability community, what ableist attitudes that need to be unlearned, the intersectionality, and so on and so forth.
I have mentioned in my blog, “The Most Crucial Step to Embrace Your Disability Identity” that grieving the life you once knew is a key step in the journey to embrace your disability. It is not easy to transition from a society that has certain attitudes and perspectives on what disability is to experiencing it for yourself. It is a journey that can take a while.
Now while grieving the life you once knew is a key step, it is not the step that magically enters into acceptance. In fact, there are many ways to learn about the disability experience that can guide you to acceptance and freedom.
How long it takes to reach the peak of radical self-acceptance is unique to each person. I am going to explain five steps that I also took to embrace being deaf and disabled.
1. Researching about disability and Deaf Culture
This was my starting point to acceptance. When I was growing up, I did not have the knowledge or a way to learn from others about what I was experiencing. I had amazing itinerant teachers who provided some insights but the system I was in was an extremely medical model forward leaving me with only the scientific side of my deafness. As I dealt with more issues and had trouble meeting the expectations of what hearing people expected from me as a cochlear implant user, I searched into the history of Deaf Culture and the current experiences in the community to find out what it actually means to be deaf.
This was eye-opening! The amount of knowledge, stories, and viewpoints of being deaf was allowing me to explore my disability in a new way. Whether it was the amazing people who are pushing forward the Deaf identity to the horrific stories of abuses and suppression of language, it forced me to critically think about what was taught to me through the medical model and what was silenced on due to the parental choice of having a cochlear implant.
The same happened when learning about the disability community. Why words are important, and how language can be a polarizing topic due to perception and historical context. Understanding that I am living in an ableist society that is working on being more accessible and inclusive but still has a long way to go is crucial to embracing identity.
2. Seeking different perspectives (especially with the healthcare system)
As I mentioned before, I grew up with the focus on the medical model. It is so easy to view it from this perspective because we interact with the healthcare system all the time. However, the majority of our experiences living our lives, that provides quality memories and experiences is how we interact with society.
As I was growing up, there was more discussion on the social model of disability as the new way of perceiving disability in our society. This was revolutionary as now there were conversations of how disability can affect experiences that abled people take for granted.
It is not the only perspective I learned along the way, there is how Deaf people perceive disability (hint, it is not a disability), there are the different word choices and their impact, there is the “Focus on Ability” perspective, there is the taking back disabled identity, and so on. It is important to keep exploring the First Voice is so important in how disability can be perceived and understanding how stories get lost in the main narrative.
3. Learn from people who have the same or similar disability
Having a disability can be isolating, especially if you do not know anyone else who is experiencing the same disability. My whole world changed when I first met others like me. All of the sudden, I did not feel alone, I could share stories and others knew exactly what I was talking about. It was liberating. While distance makes it difficult to hang out all the time, whenever I see my deaf friends again, it is like nothing changed.
It doesn’t even have to be a disability I have. I have learned so much from anyone who has a disability. We have the collective experience of dealing with ableism, inaccessibility, and adapting to this world.
4. Learning the value (gains) of having a disability
When you are first living with a disability, the focus can be, “I can’t do that, this is too hard, this sucks.” Understandable. However, having a disability can teach you things and provide you with positives that you never considered. For example, in the deaf community, there is a phrase “Deaf Gain.” Being able to communicate across the room in sign language, Deaf Gain. Having the ability to not hear the annoying noise by taking off devices, Deaf Gain. There are so many of them but those were a couple to prove my point.
For my chronic pain, it is difficult life lessons that I had to learn quickly. Set boundaries, respect rest, take care of yourself both physically and mentally. All important lessons that we need to learn but when your ability to do basic necessaries depends on it, you have to do it in order to have the quality of life you want.
5. Adapting things to life
We do not live in an accessible society that has incorporated universal design into every step of design. This means that there is quite a bit of adapting to do. Whether it is assistive devices or changing your behaviour to live in the space we interact in, this is something that has to be done. Until we live in an accessible society, this step will be needed in order to embrace and accept the disability identity.
Most of the steps to embracing and accepting the disability identity is realizing that you have an unique experience in a collective movement. Not feeling like you are alone in the journey is probably the feeling we are all looking for. Whether you find it through stories, through people, or through your experiences, accepting the disability identity is a process that can be rewarding.
Amanda