Pride.
One word. Five letters. Yet, it carries an entire cultural moment with meanings far beyond a dictionary definition. Perhaps this is never more apparent than at the transition of June into July. As the clock strikes midnight after a month of LGBTQ+ pride, we find ourselves transitioning into another “Pride Month.”
You didn’t realize that? Neither do most people. The type of pride we celebrate in July is more commonly, or maybe more comfortably, avoided or forgotten entirely. And yet, since 1990, we have celebrated July as Disability Pride Month.
Interesting phrase, isn’t it? Disability pride. It feels similar to an oxymoron like “jumbo shrimp.” After all, can one really be both disabled and proud? Where is the pride?
A heavy question, to be sure, but one I and countless other Americans have found themselves asking. One in 4, or 27%, of adults in the United States have some type of disability, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. So with such a large swath of people sharing this unique way of experiencing life, why does it seem so counterintuitive to think disability and pride could be related?
My entrance into the disabled community was rapid and unexpected: An injury crushed my spinal cord and obliterated all my future plans a week after college graduation. In a single moment, I went from walking to wheeling, having to relearn how my body moved, functioned and interacted with the world. It wasn’t quite the same as struggling through physics or organic chemistry, but it was knowledge I was even less familiar with and that was arguably more important.
How is it possible that at 21 years old, I had never thought about or been exposed to disability in a meaningful way? Now 10 years later, I know my experience was not an anomaly, as I’m consistently confronted with bias and ignorance from strangers and nondisabled peers.
Our society avoids disability, the idea or thought that our personhood could ever be “less than” the perfectly filtered Instagram versions of ourselves. Even the realization that many view a disabled status as “less than” is frightening. After all, despite efforts to turn back the clock — the global anti-aging market was valued at $63 billion last year — we will get older. And while with age comes wisdom, with age also comes disability — which doesn’t even include others like me who are welcomed into this identity by injury or illness.
Maybe this is why disability feels like the unwanted second cousin of diversity. It hits too close to home — for everyone. Regardless of your race, sexual orientation or any other piece that contributes to the puzzle of you, disability could be just a moment away. Our society doesn’t understand, or it refuses to even try to understand, the experience of disability, creating an unknown quantity that fosters fear.
I wish I could say my story was one of complete acceptance, that I was an enthusiastic new participant of the disabled community. But it wasn’t. It was and continues to be a process. I battle the monster of comparison, both to my preinjured life and the lives of my walking friends daily. As a wheelchair-using medical student, I’m reminded too frequently how disability has long been viewed as a disease or pathology — something to be fixed, not celebrated. As a proud Christian, I do mental cartwheels around teachings of physical healing of the “lame” or paralyzed while living as a woman who feels more whole, healed and loved than I ever did walking.
Disability is a complicated existence. I mean this literally. Despite the protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which seeks to shield people with disabilities from discrimination, those of us in the disabled community still experience less access to health care, inaccessible buildings and air travel, and dramatically lower rates of employment. But I also mean this emotionally, as our value and worth are minimized or simply ignored by the general majority.
So I ask again, where is the pride?
It’s in representation, such as seeing Torsten Gross, a quadriplegic with a C6 spinal cord injury, transfer into a race car from his wheelchair during a commercial for NASCAR’s first street race. It’s in words, like the name change of the U.S. Olympic Committee to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, acknowledging the remarkable accomplishments of this elite group of athletes.
Yet, disability pride shouldn’t be found only in these “big” moments and people. Disability pride is the disabled mom, dropping her kids off at school and showing them day by day there is zero shame in being different. It’s in the disabled high school student who has adapted to how they learn best, becoming their own advocate for what they need to be successful.
We celebrate Disability Pride in the extraordinary and the ordinary, two sides of the same coin flipped in a world that doesn’t often care how it lands. But we press on, continuing to make our presence known, our voices heard and our validity as humans seen.
Yes. July is indeed Disability Pride Month. A month to bring awareness to and celebrate this beautifully complicated and often unacknowledged identity. We’re here. We’re disabled. And, oh, yes, we sure are proud.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Samantha Schroth is a proud paraplegic and M.D. and Ph.D. student in Chicago. She was selected as Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin 2014 and Ms. Wheelchair America 2015 and has served
