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3:40pm September 21, 2014

chronically-rebellious:

You know what? My invisible disability IS visible.

It’s visible when I have to wear edema gloves and/or lidocaine patches because my hands are hurting so badly.

It’s visible the five times a day I take a handful of pills, or aspirin, or emergency meds. Whenever I do this around people I can feel them staring at me.

It’s visible whenever I say “ow,” or wince in pain, or say I can’t do something when I’m in too much pain.

It’s visible when I rub my temples or my knuckles, and when I ask anyone to turn down the lights or the music.

It’s visible every time I bump into someone (twice or more a day) because my sense of balance is so awful.

It’s visible every time I forget something basic and have to apologize profusely for my horrible memory.

It’s visible when I’m chronically late because my fibromyalgia messes with my sleep schedule.

My pain and disability is visible ALL THE TIME. Most people just choose not to see it.

This is why Cal Montgomery, ages ago, decided that the term “invisible disability” is kind of meaningless.  As in, whether a disability is visible has more to do with the amount of knowledge an observer has and what exactly the disabled person is doing right that second, than it does with anything about the nature of the disability.

Here’s two articles she wrote about it:

A Hard Look At Invisible Disability

Tangled In The Invisibility Cloak

I’ve seen those completely misinterpreted before, though.  Like put on lists of links about invisible disability where people say they’re “about the experience of invisible disability” or something – they’re actually about why invisible disability doesn’t work as a concept. (Or as Cal put it, “I don’t believe that there is any such thing as invisible disability. For that matter, I don’t believe in visible disability, apparent disability, or non-apparent disability.  (Yeah, I can’t believe they let me on this panel either.)”)  And this sort of stuff is exactly why.

Notes:
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