In this blog piece, Melissa Parker writes about how her experiences as a Disabled child have imprinted themselves on her, sticking through to adulthood. It is a narrative that brings to life the internalised ableism many of us feel but cannot put into words.

My parents simply didn’t believe in telling me I was disabled. But I knew there was something.

I remember the first time I realised I was something else.

I was clasping my Winnie-the-Pooh toy so hard that my fingers ached; they were pressed down and red, biting into the yellow fuzz.

I remember the smell of the hospital. Years later, my throat still reacts instinctively, retching. In the seconds before the automatic doors open, I remind myself, "You’re okay, you’re okay."

On that day, there was a new treatment—a new way to relax my muscles. The details are hazy, but I recall the sharpness, the burn, of an injection. I remember being held down and crying as it pierced my skin. I begged for it to stop. I still often have nightmares about it.

Another detail I remember is an adult member of my family leaving the room inconsolable and unable to watch. I thought to myself,

“I can’t do that. I could never do that. I’ll always have to stay.”

I put it together as children do with honest-to-goodness, simple truth.

It’s the memory—that feeling—that has stayed with me for decades.

I can never leave the room the way others do.

I mention this moment only because I think it illustrates something important about mental health and Disabled people.

We can’t ever leave the room.

Even when it hurts, even when we’re too young to understand, our chins may wobble; our knuckles may whiten. “Don’t cry,” I was so often told. This, you realise, whether young or old, is simply our lot.

Our bodies and minds are to be offered in the hope of something—a cure or acceptance or something else—and we can’t complain.

The room changes, of course, but the sensation never does. As I write this, I have that familiar feeling, a hot, sharp sickliness, in the back of my throat.

I know it well. When I was younger and the first slur was directed at me, I experienced the same sharp sickliness.

I was called a slur on the playground. I knew instinctively that it was bad and deeply personal. I wasn’t comforted; I was told that the boy who had scrunched up his face in disgust hadn’t meant it, that he was just ignorant.

I remember the way I pulled myself in. The message seemed clear, just as it had been in that friendless hospital. It was something like:

You’re on your own, kid.

I may not have been able to grasp ableism with my chubby, clumsy little hands, but I was learning the weight of it.

Now that I'm older, more than anything, I wish someone had once asked me, "Are you okay?"

Instead, I spent years punishing my body and mind.

There’s a photograph of me standing at my graduation, a picture I took because I felt I had to. I look exhausted and pale; at that point in time, I refused to do physio or wear splints. I hate that photo, not because of the way I look, but because it was my lowest point. To me, it is a visual representation of what ableism—internalised ableism, self-hatred—can do to you.

It eats you up from the inside.

It makes you weak with trying, even as others tell you, you’re not trying hard enough.

I remember my ankle twisting beneath me—the wretchedness, my head pulsing, my eyes aching from the effort. Yet still, I never thought, “That’s enough now.”

It became some twisted need to justify, prove and punish.

But how could it not?

I was raised in a culture and society that told me something was wrong and that I had to wreck myself to make up for it.

That version of me was the consequence of decades of being called slurs, being held down and being told not to be disabled—or to do it right.

When I started learning about disability history and culture, and subequently writing about my own experiences, I did so because I wanted to say to whoever needed to hear it, “This happened to me; it doesn’t have to be that way for you.”

You shouldn’t have to grapple with the idea of Tiny Tim or the superhuman; you shouldn’t have to—you shouldn’t have to.

But I’m sorry it must be that way for you, too.

I now fear and expect that the next generation of Disabled people won’t be spared my experiences.

It took me years to unlearn every lesson I had been taught—that it wasn’t okay when someone touched me or my wheelchair, that it wasn’t okay when someone called me a slur, that it wasn’t okay to ruin my body to be good enough.

It took a lot to get here. For a long time; I was lost in that, lost to it.

Every Disabled person has a story like mine, a story with understanding even in clumsiness, even in the stumble, because how is it possible to put all of the Disabled experience into words—how, on top of that, do you say this is how it impacts my mental health?

It’s so interesting that I used to think if I put the right words in the right order carefully, if I thought about where to put the emphasis enough and if I spent hours staring up at the cracks in the paint on the ceiling, then the non-disabled would get it.

There is nothing like working to be seen as a human.

My experience of the last few years has proven otherwise. The government and the me...

Disability Rights UK

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