Episode 197: Healthy, Wealthy, And Wise Ass

A shorter episode this week. There are only so many ways to say disability ≠ sickness.

Transcript

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I'm not sick. This is just my face. This is Bad Attitudes. Hello, friends and strangers. Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes, an uninspiring podcast about disability. I'm your host, Laura. This week's supporter shout out goes to Eric Zekeda. Thank you for your continuing support. If you'd like to hear your name on a future episode, consider becoming a member on Coffee. Visit ko-fi.com slash badattitudes pod for more information. You can also support the pod by visiting our merch store at badattitudeshop.etc.com, where you'll find podcast merch and satisfyingly sarcastic designs, especially for the disabled and chronically ill communities. For questions, comments, or ideas, visit the website at badattitudespod.com, email badattitudespod at gmail.com, or reach out on social media. Follow at BadAttitudes Pod on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and Blue Sky. As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. My experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community, but I am not the only voice. As a kid, I heard, oh, she's sick a lot. This is how total strangers explain to their children why I was using a wheelchair. She's sick. Sick? Me? If I was sick, I wouldn't be out and about. I'd be at home watching the prices right and Mori Povich the way sick kids my age always did. As a kid, I didn't think much of it. As an adult, I recognized that these parents were avoiding hard questions. Or what they perceived as hard questions. Not being a parent myself, I can't say anything with confidence, but it seems to me that some parents think hard questions are any questions they don't know the answer to. Any question they can't answer and that might lead to more questions are questions to be avoided. But let's be real, asking why another kid uses a wheelchair isn't a hard question. Your kid doesn't need the person's entire medical history. All they need to know is that some people need help getting around. Boom, done and dusted. One of the best interactions I ever had was when a kid asked her mom why I was in a wheelchair, and the mom said, Because God makes everybody different. Super simple, to the point, and the daughter accepted it. She had clearly been educated about diversity and inclusion since a very young age. Although some people who use a wheelchair, or any mobility aid, are sick, not everyone is. You can't look at someone and determine their level of health based on a disability. You can't look at someone and determine their level of health, period. People are especially egregious about assuming someone's health based on weight. A person with a larger body is not automatically unhealthy. There are many, many indicators of health, and most of them cannot be assessed visually. If you look at me, you see I use a wheelchair, but you probably can't assess why. Granted, most people assume I'm paralyzed and then lose their ever-loving minds when I move my legs. It never gets old. And size certainly isn't an indicator of health. I've known several thin people who had underlying health problems that were a lot more dangerous than their weight would suggest. But because they were thin, they were generally expected to be super healthy. Meanwhile, my doctor has been telling me to lose weight practically since my first appointment with her when I was in college. Ironically, I think I was at my healthiest in college. I was rolling around my campus every day, putting my chair in and out of my car, and was just generally way more active than I am now. My blood pressure and cholesterol were in good shape, but I wasn't a size acceptable for an 18-year-old, so that wasn't good enough. I wish I were still in the shape I was in in college. Let's not forget about invisible disabilities. People who are not visibly disabled can appear perfectly healthy, but chronic illness is incredibly deceptive. Pain levels fluctuate, but pain never goes away. You can do something one day you may not be able to do the next. But the average person is almost never going to be able to clock any of that just by looking at you. Sick can also mean different things. If you say to me, I'm sick, my first thought is that you have a cold or something equally innocuous. With varying methods of delivery, it can also mean you have an upset stomach or you've just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sick is a spectrum, but it's not a visual spectrum. You can't look at a person and know they're sick. There are exceptions to that, of course. There are times when you can look at someone and know, oh, that person has something going on. Things like their pallor or their breathing or the state of their eyes. There are signals. But you still cannot safely assume someone's health status just by looking at them. Equivocating disability with sickness is another way to delegitimize and take away the autonomy of disabled people. Because with sickness comes weakness. And if you're weak, no one is going to expect much from you. And if they don't expect much, they also they also don't have to give much. Some disabled people are sick. Disabled people can be sick sometimes and well other times. Disabled people are not sick by default. I think it's also important to recognize that there is a difference between being sick and being immunocompromised, or being sick and being chronically ill. Sick is a word that means a lot of things, but doesn't encompass everything accurately. Most important though, it's okay to tell your kids that you don't know the specifics of why another person uses a mobility aid, and it's also okay to tell them it's not any of their business. It is perfectly acceptable to tell your child that a person uses a mobility aid to help them get around and leave it at that. If your child continues to pull at the thread, well that gives you the perfect opportunity to tell them that everyone is different, and sometimes we don't get to know the answer to every question. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next one.