In one of our recent classes we discussed our first ideas for our pieces. Perhaps I didn’t explain what I wanted to do very well, which is highly likely given my disability means that I can’t always put across idea very well especially under pressure, as the feedback I received did not exactly match what I was trying to explain. The class seemed to think that want to tell some kind of sob story about how I became disabled, when that’s never what I’ve wanted to do…simply because it’s not a sob story. I realised that the class had very ablest ideas about what having a disability must be like and it was that, rather than their actual feedback, that started to give me some structuring and script ideas for my piece. Some things that the class said actually, to be perfectly honest, annoyed me and at times were offensive, though this was unintentional on their part.
I was referred to as “less-abled”.
This is not a word you use to describe disabled people! It implies that I am less than an abled person and that is not the case. I am not “less-abled”. I am DISABLED. Being disabled is an identity. It’s something that a lot of disabled people are proud of. Disabled is also the correct term to use.
Another thing that was said was that “what happen was a really horrible thing to happen to you…”
This is a very ablest point of view. I do not see my disability as something horrible because very simply it’s not. Yeah it obviously changed my life and changed the way I live but that does not make it a bad thing. Another word that got thrown around was the word “inspiring” which is a word that is not as kindly looked upon by the disabled community as abled-bodied people seem to think it is. I’m not inspiring. I’m a student. The same as everyone else in the room. I have not done anything inspiring so I do not want to be called that just because I am in a wheelchair…that does not sit well with me.
I never wanted to do a piece that was some sob story about how I went from abled-bodied to disabled, I wanted to do a piece in which I use my own story to discuss this idea of being disabled. The disabled identity. You do not become disabled the moment you gain your condition, you become disabled over time. This made me think of videos that BBC Three have been doing recently which things not to say to certain people and there’s quite a few disability related ones. These videos have helped me come up with an idea for the structure of my piece. I plan to do on the idea of things not to say to disabled people. I still want to use physical theatre so what I plan to do is to answer certain questions, like “what’s wrong with you”, using movement sequences.
Now that I’ve got this idea I now plan to work out what questions I want to answer and work out a draft script to work from.