Although I believe the point of exercises like blogging-against-disablism day is to share the great strides (see, even my metaphors aren't clean of bias) one has made in learning to understand that we all share a common history of oppression, of having our best gifts denied by a larger culture that just sees our liabilities and blah-blah-blah. I'm working on it.

I even understand a bit about inter-disability bias from having my stock shrink in some "brother" or "sister"'s mind when they find out how much attendant services I really need. This really hurts.

But that doesn't stop me from being terrified that one day I might be typing along on a page like this one and someday the words I think I'm arranging so carefully won't make any sense at all. I know if that happens, it would occur to me to want to stop living, even though I know the truest disability-rights response is to insist that living doesn't have an IQ prerequisite, or an optimum word count. I can write that, approve of myself writing it, and yet the pit of my gut remains unchanged.

You could blame that on my family, or The Man, that they were encouraged to see my...cleverness, verbal facility, or maybe it's a gift of Irish blarney, as a way out of what they saw as a pretty impossible set of circumstances. Or maybe I was too firm about wanting to be acknowledged for my gifts so I set myself up a nice gilded cage as The Smart One, knowing there wasn't much of a prize in being The Smart Spaz.

It was the thing I had most, though, so I tried to wrap it around myself. Other people with disabilities thought I was amazingly stuck-up and obnoxious. I'm still working on that, too, by trying to listen at least as much as I talk and trying not to steamroll over someone's life experience with some quotation I saw in a book, and by being willing to pitch in in more fights than those that have limited, personal implications.

We can be a lot different and still respect each other; still get mad when we read that people who live in institutions don't get the same rights to friendship and sexual expression that I might have(even while acknowledging that the freedom I have isn't what my hot able-bodied friend would have.)

Ableism deforms everyone it touches. In my case, the praise for being the Smart One left me too vulnerable to behavior like grade-grubbing and the sense that I was only good when somebody else slapped a gold star on me. I'm sorry for every time I didn't befriend someone because something they did or said made me think that Somebody Else might think we'd "look weird,"even if I was never sure who was watching. I'm sorry for every time I didn't participate in conversations because my response might not be "normal enough,"
--Erika Jahneke