Elucidating Questions

It’s funny

When you’re disabled you see things and you just know someone’s going to have trouble accessing them

But able bodied people insist that if they aren’t disabled then nothing around them needs to be accessible

God forbid they get old or have an accident which changes their mobility

And me saying that things are inaccessible is an attack on able bodied people

They mock me for saying that it’s not accessible

They tell me I have a victim complex

And am only thinking about myself

They tell me this about things that I will never be able to physically be there to access and thus it is incomprehensible that I am in fact thinking of myself when pointing out they’re inaccessible

This world of the quickest snappiest nastiest thing you can think of off the top of your head

I get treated like a bigot for being perturbed by inaccessibility all around me

When you’re disabled you see things differently

It doesn’t matter that I will never be there

Someone will experience the inhumane moment when they’re not capable of getting somewhere everyone else goes

And why don’t you want to be the solution to that awful feeling?

But they don’t

I noticed it early, being a lefty

Because the world is built for right handed people

I can’t use scissors properly

Not for me

But when the mobility issues started popping up

I was thrust into this new perspective that I frankly hate

That I wish no one else had to experience

There’s a Starbucks near my house with two entries but only one has a disability button and it’s out of the way, and more narrow so it’s awkward for wheelchairs

And they both have really high, uneven, and loose, dividers that make coming over them in mobility devices difficult

There’s curbs for crosswalks all over town that go down into the road but then have a second, steep, drop and I’ve almost fallen over them in my walker more than once

Theres a person who parks out front our place and blocks off the entire entry way so I can’t leave with my walker

These are things I face incessantly, daily, if I go out of my home

It’s like slow water torture

You don’t belong here

The world was made for other people, not you

So, yeah, when I see things that are inaccessible I get frustrated

Disability is a fact of life and we should frame everything we do around it. Stairs shouldn’t even exist.

Stairs should have been reimagined as something that people in wheelchairs can use by now

Why are we all assuming that every person with a mobility issue has the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to renovate a place to be accessible?

“Build it normal and then someone can renovate it to be accessible later”

Hence half of downtown businesses (built in the late 18 early 1900s) are inaccessible and unfixable because

“Sorry they were already here”

I’m so tired of disability being an afterthought

I’m so sick of people like me being an afterthought