I will never forget the student who was absolutely OUTRAGED that I would use chronic migraine as an example of disability “when there are people who are REALLY disabled.”
I even posted the WHO fact sheet identifying migraine as the most prevalent disability worldwide but I doubt it changed her mind
I cannot emphasize this enough:
The knee-jerk assumption that disabled people are faking is not a result of how many fakers there are out there.
The belief that there are so many fakers out there is a result of the knee-jerk assumption that disabled people are faking.
My generally lovely housemate in Omaha was watching some bullshit Penn & Teller show where they were debunking the ADA (which *is* frankly bullshit in a lot of ways, just not the ones they presented) and she turned to me and said, "Wow, by that definition even you'd be disabled." and... yes, I am?
Yeah, I have a lot of students who are less belligerent than the migraine denier but possibly even more resistant to the definition of disability that I present bc it would include them, speaking to your initial point about how we suffer from cruel optimism + internalized ableism 😢
There's *many* ways I'm lucky that I had parents who were involved with school parent-teacher stuff and also advocated for me as a disabled child, which 1) taught me that I am disabled and 2) gave me a good foundation for understanding how embracing this as fact was necessary for dealing with it.
The fact that I couldn't get out of dealing with teachers who were hostile, skeptical, or apathetic to my accommodations wore that advantage down over time until I internalized that it was easier/better to Virtuously Overcome as much as possible than insist on accommodations, but it still helped.
I keep thinking about this post because it keeps popping up in my notifications (which is one reason I post, it helps me remember things) and it strikes me how the idea I would thank my parents for teaching me I'm disabled would strike so many of the Push Past It people as harm they did to me.
"Teaching kids that they're disabled is setting limitations on what they can do."
Then so is teaching kids they can't touch a hot stove or play in traffic. Life in a physical universe of physical laws comes with limitations. It's good to know what they are.
The things I've today include clearing a stubborn drain and cleaning a toilet, in one of the smallest and least ventilated spaces in our house. I could not have done these things safely without minding my limitations.
I might have got them done anyway. I might not have injured myself in an obvious and acute way in the process. But it would have cost me. I wouldn't have been able to do as good a job and I wouldn't be able to do as much for the rest of the day.
And not all injuries are big obvious things like a bleeding bump on the head or a sprain or broken bone. Doing a physical chore's going to wipe me out, but it might be "need to sit down for a few minutes" or "need to lie down for an hour", or I might still be recovering next week.
People fall for the "push past your limits to build up endurance/tolerance" line because it matches how we talk about exercise, but even with physical exercise it's more complicated than that and very possible to do more harm to yourself than good if you don't know what you're doing.
Every time you push your body past its limits, you're doing harm and it's not like we have convenient on-screen meters telling us what kind of harm, how much, and how long it's going to last.
I had a bunch of non-optional things going on in May. I had to push hard and I crashed so badly my doctor recommended an ADA accommodation. It wasn’t even work stuff 😭 It has taken a MONTH to recover but you would never know by looking at me, because I am a cheerful-ass bitch
