Disability Pride: Why I am a Cripple.

Recently, this blog post has been making its rounds on my facebook newsfeed. It's about how the writer thinks the word cripple is better than "disabled". So far three people have reposted it, but I did not read it until this morning. My friend Stephanie commented that I was “ahead of the game,” so I gave it a glance.

I have been calling myself a cripple for 12 years. When I first started doing it, people were appalled, especially disabled people. Some of the most common responses were, “You shouldn’t put yourself down”; “you’re not crippled, you’re ‘differently abled’!”; “You don’t want the world to see you that way, do you?” Now when I say it, most people are still appalled; but my fellow cripples? They’re giving me the fist bump. It’s amazing what twelve years can do.

I am not saying that I made this change single handedly. I didn’t. But in college I was one of the only people who were truly proud of being disabled. While most other people in my age group were trying their best to highlight the things that they could do, to show the world they were no different and to make their disabilities a small (and insignificant) fraction of who they were, I was shining a spotlight on mine and shouting “HEY YOU! LOOK AT ME! I AM CRIPPLED! I KNOW I’M AWESOME AND YOU ARE TOTALLY JEALOUS.”

I remember sophomore year of college, I chalked the phrase: Being disabled is fun; everyone should try it!” on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. Later that night, the resident advisors knocked on the door and started yelling at my roommate for the offensive and discriminatory phrases she wrote on the sidewalk. She walked away and said,

“Melissa, you have company.” I rolled up to the door and smiled at the two girls. They were a lot nicer to me.

“You wrote this?” they asked.

“Yup,” I replied.

“Oh,” they said. “Have a nice night.”

I closed the door. My roommate couldn’t believe it.

“How can they think it’s offensive and discriminatory when I write it but not when you do it?”

“What are they gonna do Stephy, tell me my life isn’t fun? There was nothing offensive about that. They are just not used to people like me being out and proud.” We still laugh about that story to this day.

I was a cripple. I was done apologizing for it. I wanted everyone to know I was sick of the issue being skirted around. Sick of being asked “What do you like to be called?” and “Do you have any special needs we should be concerned with?” and having to answer politely because people “meant well.” So I started answering truthfully. “Melissa.” I’d say, and when they looked confused, “if you must, just tell them I’m a cripple.” As for my needs, I actually told one person I hadn’t gotten laid in a while. It turned out that wasn’t a need they were prepared to accommodate. Their loss.

Calling myself a cripple was my way of accepting my disability. It was completely liberating to no longer feel like it was my duty to make other people feel okay about the fact that I was disabled; to try to fit in and to be ‘normal’.

And why shouldn’t I be proud? My disability has put me through the ringer. It has knocked me down. It has said, “You’ll never succeed; you’ll never have real friends and no one could ever love you or want you.” And in response, I told my disability to fuck off, I had succeeded. Not by fitting my square butt into a round hole or by insisting that I was just like everyone else, but by embracing the fact that it didn’t and I wasn’t.

It worked for me, and apparently now it is working for others as well. This is one change that I can embrace. Here’s to a world full of cripples; loud and proud and not backing down.

My First Pinterest Experiment: Anniversary Photo Shoot

I always have these grand ideas that never amount to much of anything. I am not sure why this happens. I could be laziness of my part. I mean sometimes I am just so tired, my ideas just take so much work and my bed is just so damned comfy. My Pinterest boards are full of recipes and craft ideas that I will probably never get around to actually trying, but it’s comforting that they are there in case, someday, I find myself rich and rested with oodles of free time.

Once in a while though, I do get things done. I have, so far in my adult life completed a few projects or goals, including:  my college education, the first draft of three novels (please don’t ask about the revisions), ten quilts, a wedding and now, drumroll please, my first Pinterest pin.

Now, there are those of you that do this every day who are probably not impressed with that last one. Then again, you probably don’t find things like jumping or skipping to be impressive either, and I am quite amazed by those things. The rest of you who might be impressed are probably hoping I stop babbling and just tell you what I did.

Here it is:

It’s an anniversary picture where you take a picture of the two of you holding a picture from the year before. Cute Right?

Well it took me a full month after my anniversary, but I got my friend Martha to come over and snap a few pics for us. It was quick and painless. Although, Tom did have to shave a bit. (If you can believe it.)

By the way, are those shirts not awesome? The logo and shirt are the brainchild of a company called 3ELove. If you have not heard of 3ELove before I enourage you to check them out. It’s a great company with a great message.

What's Wrong with me? Nothing, I'm Awesome.

Language is dangerous. Writers have always known this. As Edward Bulwer-Lytton said, “The Pen is mightier than the sword.” All of us have heard the phrase, but I think few of us tend to give it much weight. Words, whether they are written are spoken, have a lot of power. They have the power to create change, to inspire, to empower; but they also have the power to destroy, to break down. 

In college, I began using the word cripple to describe myself, mostly for shock value. It was an ice breaker in a way. I thought that maybe by calling myself a cripple it might put others at ease, they wouldn’t be so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. But I also started doing it because I was sick of the word disabled. To me disabled is the nasty word, not because of its definition, but because the word disabled implies that there is something less about me, something I am not, or cannot. It compares me to everyone else, and with those odds stacked against me, I’ll never come out on top. 

The word cripple, though traditionally frowned upon by the politically correct, has a similar definition to the word disabled, but when I use it I don’t feel as though I am being compared to someone else, or judged by some ridiculous standard. Plus, it has the advantage of making people a little uncomfortable. This is only fair if people are going to ask me personal questions in public or tell me that if I pray hard enough or try hard enough I will be normal, because that makes me uncomfortable.

I am not the only person using this terminology to describe themselves. Some choose other words like Gimp, Crip and Spaz. I don’t think we do it for humor. I think it comes from two main places: the feeling of solidarity and the empowerment that it gives us, and secondly, it’s our way to fight back against the politically correct and the language that has been deemed acceptable when talking about “people like us”.

People without disabilities think that there is shame in being disabled. They try to lessen the blow by coming up with phrases like “handicapable”, “differently-abled” and “disABILITY”. They did it for us, the people with the disabilities, so that we wouldn’t feel left out or ashamed; but, I (and most of the other people I know who have disabilities) am proud to be a part of the disability culture. My Cerebral Palsy has never shamed me. What has shamed me is the way other people have reacted to it. When my principal and teachers decided I was "too sick" for the ropes course in 5th grade camp and sent me home, I was ashamed. When my teachers kept me inside at recess on field day, I was ashamed. When my mother, only one trying to be helpful, cleared a path for me in a crowded room by shouting, “She’s handicapped!” I was ashamed. My disability caused none of this shame, people did. Of course, it wasn't until I began to hear words like 'gimp' and 'cripple' and 'spaz' used by people with disabilities and began using them myself, that I realized it.

The funny thing is, as I have gotten older, I’ve noticed that even words you mean to use positively can turn against you. Ever since I was a teenager my other friends with CP and I have been using the word spaz with each other. It is a perfectly appropriate term considering how jumpy and spastic we all are.

But recently, I was with a friend looking at some pictures on her facebook page and I noticed that in her captions she often had written something like: “This is a great picture of all of us, except Liz, she looks like a spaz.” At first it didn’t bother me because in a few of the pictures, Liz did look like a spaz. But then I noticed that a perfectly lovely picture of Liz would have the same type of caption. My friend had sad Liz looked like a spaz in EVERY picture. So then I got a bit upset and asked my friend why she was being so mean, was she jealous? (because Liz is beautiful, there is no denying that.) My friend got upset and called me a hypocrite. And she was right.

The thing is, I didn’t feel like she was using the word in a positive way anymore. She had used it the way kids who weren't our friends had used on the playgrounds of our childhood, to make Liz separate, or less. Sure the rest of us could be pretty, but Liz, she was a Spaz.

Words are tricky bastards.

So maybe I don’t want to use any of them anymore. Maybe I will just take the disability out of the equation all together. It’s never been that important. Sure people will still compare my body to theirs, they might still want to know why, they might still think of me as less and they might use my differences is a reason to disregard me, and put me aside. That sucks for them, because I am Awesome. I really am, ask my friends. I can see them having this conversation from now on:

Poor Sap: So what’s up with that friend of yours anyway?
Friend: Which one?
Poor Sap: The one in the wheelchair
Friend: Oh Melissa? She’s Awesome.


So from now on let’s all just be Awesome. Mkay?