4:06am May 4, 2015

“It’s important for a woman with Down syndrome to be able to look in the mirror, actually see herself reflected back, and like what she sees. This is the birth of power.”

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I don’t have Down syndrome, but I’m unusual-looking enough, partly related to disability, that this statement means a lot to me. I once got anon hate saying that I knew I was just ugly, and that I must be trying really hard to love how I look every time I look in the mirror, but everyone knew I was lying, etc. Followed by the usual crap about how fat people are ugly.

People don’t understand what it’s like to have visible elements of your disability, or disfigurement, that have been seen as ugly and bad for so long that you absorb it into yourself. It’s different than the usual body image issues a lot of people have for other reasons. Not to belittle those issues. But it’s different.

Here’s a very close paraphrase of something someone said about me once. I’d made an anonymous website to mock an ASA website that was belittling autistic people, and my pictures were all over it. This person said, “I used to work in institutions with people who looked exactly like her. And there’s no way she wrote that. Someone’s exploiting her.”

I’ve gotten that kind of reaction a lot. Because I somehow “look severely intellectually disabled” to a lot of people.

And still I can look in the mirror most days and see myself as beautiful. Also as ugly, but not in a bad way, and not in a way that contradicts being beautiful. And I can look at people who really do have severe intellectual disabilities and see them as beautiful, too. It takes no effort because they are beautiful. If you look at the light shining through everyone on this planet, you can see beauty reflected through it. But sometimes the person it’s hardest to see this in, is yourself.