Dear Young Disabled Person

I want to impart some lessons I have learnt over the years. This is not dogma, throw it away if it is no use to you.

Most of the world surrounding you is bullshit. You will find the flaws to any system, society or human by being disabled.

The world will put your body into boxes, your worth into forms. You will have to prove your pain to people who have already decided they don’t believe you.

The failure is not with you; it is with them.

First, learn the difference between your limitations and their oppression of you.

Inaccessible homes, workplaces, transport; inaccessible hearts and very accessible bullshit, prejudice, bureaucracy, medical system harm – these are the strings of the puppet world that will try to ensnare you.

If you can, do not hate yourself. Find your fire, your rain, your sun, your shelter within yourself.

Not everyone deserves access to you. Attempt to be inaccessible to systems, build internal and external shields. For me, it is art, meditation to increase self awareness and de-condition what has been taught to me, activism, being with nature, humour. It will be different for you.

You can tell ableism to go fuck itself with its rancid micropenis.

Fight for rights, but don’t wear yourself out. You are not required to destroy yourself to prove commitment to a cause. Rest is activism too. Being alive and yourself and unapologetic is activism too.

Find your joy – play, be in environments that offer softness, eat cake, stroke an animal, wank. Joy is not a cop-out; it is what your skin should be holding.

Don’t wait for permission to live. Live as if you are already free. When I do that, it is obvious normal people can’t cope with that, and they try to rip you down and make excuses for their unimaginative and unexamined subservience.

You can be rageful, you can be kind. You can still need help, and still be dangerous to oppression.

The apparatus will try to break you, make you hate yourself, find ways to make this an impossibility.

Make art. You do not need to know what you are doing.

Take up space. Do the mental equivalent of manspreading. I call it ‘madspreading’ Take up more space than has been allocated to you.