Assorted voices: “Disability is a natural normal part of life.” “Spoonies unite.” “I am not the cripple you think I am.” “Our community has a radical understanding for each other.” “Nice wheels.” “I still have sex. I pissed myself in the hospital.” “Challenge those ableist myths.” “Thank you for showing up as you are.” “Collective liberation.” “This is disability. Don't look away.”
Isabella: Hello and welcome to Unapologetically Disabled, where we are crude, rude and open about all things disability. I'm Isabella and I've got my co-host here, Anneka, we’ll introduce ourselves shortly. I want to acknowledge that Unapologetically Disabled is recorded on Whadjuk Noongar land, and we pay our respects to elders, past and present. We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and this always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Today's episode is a short introduction to who we are, why disability pride is important to us and what it means to be unapologetically disabled. So I'm going to give your ears a little break from my voice and let Anneka introduce themselves.
Anneka: Hello, my name is Anneka and I use they/them pronouns. I have white blonde fluffy hair, silver piercings, brown eyes, the sides of my hair is shaved and I use a prosthetic leg and a prosthetic crutch, which I am keen to talk about what they mean to me.
Isabella: And my name is Isabella, my pronouns are she/they and a visual description of myself is I am a tan Asian young person. I have brown hair, shaved sides with some head tattoos. I've got gold jewelry, gold facial jewelry and today I'm wearing an all brown outfit. So the reason that we give a visual description is, you know, usually when we're out public speaking, we give a visual description for people who are blind or have low vision and don't have all the information presented to them. But what I love doing on these podcasts is we're sort of flipping the script because we're giving you information that you don't actually have visual information. So I don't know, I think it's fun and we'll keep doing those visual descriptions.
Now we're going to get into our stories about disability and we've got very different stories, but we sort of come together in this beautiful disability crip space. So, Anneka, would you mind giving us a rundown of your world of disability?
Anneka: That is something that I'm so keen to explore within the world of Unapologetically Disabled is our different journeys of disability. I was born with a physical disability which requires me to use a prosthetic and, later, after an operation failed, a crutch. I also use a wheelchair in and out as I'm much more capable in a wheelchair and prefer them. But I was born with something called Proximal Femoral Focal Deficiency, which is the rare deformity, random occurrence, no reason, just luck of the draw. Literally. And one leg's shorter than the other. It's not that complicated. There are some other like mild complications within how that structures with my skeleton and my body. But a lot of people ask me what happened or what went wrong. And I was literally just born like this. It's not a big thing.
Also having the privilege of being born disabled means that you're instantly disabled whether you like it or not. So how that shaped my understanding of disability was quite dramatic, especially later in life being diagnosed with bipolar, which is my other disability, and experiencing what it was like having an invisible disability. Most people expect the majority of my struggles to be because of my physical disability. My bipolar has daily evolving symptoms that I am still learning. So the concept of disability is that it's something painful, it’s a struggle. That stereotype of a disability, I don't apply to my physical disability whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to me. It's just how it is.
But something that gives me pain and suffering and symptoms that I can't see or I don't know where they're coming from. I don't understand how they got there is so much more painful. And having a psychosocial disability really changed my understanding of my physical disability.
Isabella: And I think that that's just a really interesting focus on how the outside world sees disability. I think that when we come into the disability community, there are no assumptions. I wouldn't come in and be like, "Oh yeah, physically disabled, you must have these symptoms or whatever”. I am open to you explaining your disability to me. I think you covered really briefly the differences in our disabilities. So my story is I was an able-bodied person growing up. I was an elite athlete. My ideas of what it meant to be healthy were pretty fucked, to be honest. And then when I was 16, I became very unwell and was later diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. And that absolutely changed my world.
There was a lot of grief. There was a lot of mourning, and you know a lot of it was my body but also a lot of it was because my understanding of disability was so different that I was mourning all these things I thought that I had lost because I didn't understand that actually I hadn't lost community, I hadn't found my community yet. There were so many things I was worried about like I'd never be able to go to uni, I'd never be able to have a job, I'd never be able to have friends who understood, and all of that I have found in the disabled community. But I guess it's just really interesting to almost compare our journeys in disability. But this is a short episode so I'm gonna move on to what is Unapologetically Disabled, what does that mean?
Anneka: We are taught by society that people are uncomfortable with disability. They don't want to look at it, they don't want to see it and they especially don't want to watch any struggle you have with it.
Isabella: Oh yeah.
Anneka: That's why they only want to compliment you of going, “well done, you're out”, but not recognise any of the struggles it took to get out.
Isabella: A lot of disability is in the daily life. It's in the mediocre. It's the being in pain. It's the changing a catheter. It's the vomiting under a desk. You know, all this stuff, it makes people feel uncomfortable, but I do this every day. This is my norm. So why the hell are you uncomfortable with my life?
Anneka: We teach disabled people to shame themselves into silence, especially when they're with able-bodied, non-disabled people. I'm so sick of that. I'm sick of being told that as a disabled person, I have to be quiet about my pain. I live with a lot of pain. You know, I'm in pain at the moment. I've got a dislocated hip, my back hurts. Like all of these things. I don't want to be taught that I have to protect able-bodied people's ego and comfort. I want to be unapologetically disabled. And what that means is disability is ugly. It is tragic sometimes. It is painful and full of grief and darkness, but out of that comes beauty and community building and so many other incredible things.
Isabella: It means taking up space. It means showing who we are and not hiding, not letting people look away from the dark bits of disability. So thank you so much for tuning into Unapologetically Disabled. If you like our content, you want to follow along, follow us on Instagram, unapologetically.disabled.
We’re Isabella and Anneka, please go gently and tune in next time.
