Why Are We Ashamed of Our Disabilities?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with us!

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

This morning I sat at my desk and opened Twitter to see what was happening in the world. Or, as my mom would probably say, “I got on The Twitter.”

One of the first things I ran across was a tweet from someone who said, “I really don’t know how I feel about being officially autistic. It’s like I’ve waited all this time and now I’m just like, “ok so now what?” I don’t know who to tell or why to tell. I really have no idea what I feel about it! Is this part of my alexithymia?”

It’s sad that we can feel this way about ourselves, but it’s something that we all face from time, whether we want to admit it or not.

It doesn’t matter if you have an official diagnosis of your disability of if you just suspect/believe you do. Lack of diagnosis doesn’t make you any less autistic or disabled. I was autistic for 45 years before I was diagnosed.

No matter what your disability or disabilities, we’re people. So often we can feel like less of a person because we have something we struggle with, but we shouldn’t feel that way.

Having a disability doesn’t make us less of a person, and no one is better than us. If anyone looks down on us for being who we are, that’s on them. Not on you.

In autism support groups on Facebook I constantly read posts from people who don’t want to tell others about their autism. They don’t want to tell people because of the stigma surrounding autism.

One person recently asked what is wrong with them as a person with autism. “If you’re autistic, you should be able to easily recognize patterns,” they said. “I don’t see patterns easily. What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with that person. Nothing is wrong with any of us. It doesn’t matter if we’re in a wheelchair, if we have a physical disability, or a developmental disability.

We’re perfectly created people. Not perfectly created people with a disability, just perfectly created people. Period.

Just because some people with your condition are good at one thing doesn’t mean we should all have that trait. How bad would it suck if we were all the same? It would get boring pretty…