(Dis)ability isn’t vulnerability, and it isn’t helplessness. When people who have a (dis)ability are seen as helpless and weak, it’s not the person who is seen, but instead a societal construction.
Victims are not born; they are made through a process of robbing. The victimization and systematic robbing of humanity is a process that has become a norm.
We segregate, we alienate, we control, until there’s no opportunity for uncomfortable situations of learning and understanding. We push, and we pigeonhole, and we restrict, until a victim is coaxed out. But why?
Is it because victims are manageable? Victims are made in the name of efficiency and convenience.
How about we empower instead? We can challenge the patriarchal constructs that lend so well to dehumanizing (dis)ability and place the rights of a human being before the convenience and comfort of those with privilege.
To shift this paradigm would give the experience of (dis)ability back to individual in entirety. For (dis)ability is insight and it’s confusion. It’s challenge and it’s opportunity. It’s power and it’s the identity of an invisible minority.
But, above all, it is the up to the interpretation of the person with the (dis)ability.