#disability oppression

This is one of the high tables that is outside Nelson Dining Hall at OU. There are also several like this one inside. The chair seats are just over 3 feet above the ground, with the tabletops just slightly above that. While there are other tables to be used at Nelson, these high ones are common and privilege able-bodied people. Someone with a wheelchair would not be able to sit at one of these tables and be able to reach the tabletop, which greatly limits which tables they are able to use, as opposed to an able-bodied person. According to RDSJ, page 461, ableism or disability oppression is “a term used to describe the all-encompassing system of discrimination and exclusion of people living with disabilities”. These chairs, and furniture on campus like them, exclude people who live with certain physical disabilities, which forces them to choose from a smaller amount of chairs to sit at, which can be quite difficult during peak hours in dining halls.

When you work in a toxic environment that is multiply oppressive and repressive of difference, it gets hard to answer the question are you happy? I just asked myself that and I felt this great emptiness. I woke up from a dream in which I had a dance exam the next day. I had been out with my work colleagues entertaining them. I'd organised tickets and shown people how to get to places, I'd done a dress rehearsal performance for them and then I had needed to go home at the end of the night. I asked all my colleagues, who all had access to cars, if they could give me a ride home because I had this big bag on my back and could not ride my bike home. They all said no, there was this awkward silence, the kind of silence that says we are all not willing to go that extra way out of our way for you and we wish you had not asked and made things awkward. So I was like ok, I walked out and when I got to a certain point where they could not see me, I took flight, rising above all the houses, at one point I picked up what I thought were gifts, some carrier bags, that I knew were left by one of my people for just such occasions. I loved that fuck you feeling of flying home, I felt like "you don't even know the beautiful creature that you have rejected”.

  I feel this way about my profession, I feel like it has lost me permanently, there is no way that I would fly back to take all that shit from it. I am gone now. I do not fly for or dance for them, I do it for me and for my people and my people are all struggling to fly home alone. Flying out of toxic environments when we can, breaking away from being pulled into a system that is damaging. I hate my profession especially because it tries to present itself as liberal, and better than everyone else, "we are these kinds of people we are better than everyone else." but from my view point they are just as bad as everyone else and just as unaware of the damage that they do to so many. When you are the dominant culture, it’s not possible or easy to see the ways that you are excluding or harming people who are in less dominant cultures. Wait – I think I am letting them off here, I think it is easy to see, it is easy to notice, it’s just more convenient to ignore it, to push people aside, to not really be interested in listening. They are there to watch the dance they don 't want to know the physical and emotional trauma that goes into creating the person that I am and that so many people in my life are. People who have learnt to be beautiful, have learnt to dance, and to fly in a world that marks them out as different. In a world that has demanded a single cultural dominance, a way to be that is acceptable. A world that has marked bodies as being worthy of inclusion and bodies that are too brown, too fat, too weak, too gender non conforming, too dark, too poor, too angry, too artistic, we all learned to fly and leave supportive gifts on roof tops for each other, even when it’s too hard for us to always be together, because us coming together is too threatening to the dominance and toxic environments we live in.

I can do nothing but write. Is there an assumption that I should just keep going? That my role is to keep overcoming while people choose to use their power over me, while people try to control me, try to theorise me and try to  belittle me. I don’t know how to describe it, when I try to think how to summarise where I am at I cannot, this is partly why I am compelled to write rather than talk but I also feel that there is no one out there that can carry the weight of my pain right now, there is no one with whom I can speak of this to, how do you find the words for something when there are not ears to listen? I am trying maybe to explain it to myself so that I can listen so that I might be able to hear my own pain, so that the part of me that knows how to find a way forward will hear it but at the same time I feel resistant to the inevitability that I will move forward, I have always been moving forward, pushing my body full of toxic feelings of exhaustion pain and discomfort I’ve always been pushing this body through toxic socio -political environments that have tried to crush me.

Why is it impossible for the world to accept difference? Why is it impossible for people to listen to look for understanding rather than deception, and pathology? I don’t know if my acute awareness of this type of thing is helping me or damning me. I feel so exhausted from having to explain or having to create a defense a thick skin against the idiotic things that people think, the ways in which people fail to think. Racism, sexism, disability oppression, classism, gender oppression, mental health oppression, trans oppression, homophobia, antisemitism, colonialism,  they are not just taken for granted experiences they are unacceptable. Every way in which these things are subtly and explicitly directed towards me or towards any other people is unforgivable. They are intolerable, they hold people down, they kill people, they are killing me, how do I watch my own death? How do I find a way to not be powerless, when I feel so powerless, why am I expected to push forward to keep fighting when my very ability to fight is being attacked? All of my tools for resisting are being taken from me, the world feels so hard like it does not want me to exist and the world would be able to roll over my dead body and move on, continue to operate as if nothing has happened. Continue to hurt and destroy so many other people.

My way of being, my body, my mind, my spirituality, my hope, my beliefs, my life’s story are all under attack of denial. How do I get to write my world? And not allow those in power to tell my story? To erase my experiences?

Anxious words, ignorance, malevolence, all of these excuses that allow people to not have to face the humanity in others, people can forget that there are human beings in front of them, I don’t feel it is just a mistake, mistakes are apologiesd for mistakes are taken back and corrected. These are not mistakes they are choices to continue to operate the machine the way that it has been designed to operate.

I have a new appreciation for anger in a way that I have not understood it until recently, anger is often a sign we are still awake, it’s a sign that we are still fighting that we still have fight inside us, that we still believe in injustice and that we are dissatisfied with the society and the world as it is. I have this anger, this fire inside me that is so dissatisfied that is so enraged. I demand more, and I will not be told to stop demanding more, but does this make my existence inevitably painful? And what is anger when all the doors have been closed? I need somewhere to rage, I need something to rage at? Can I keep raging at those who choose to never hear? What does my rage archive? I’m drowning here under the weight of this, how can I express the depth of this pain, how would anyone ever understand how deeply I feel this, how it eats away at me, how it holds me down.

Maybe I just need a break from the fighting, maybe I need to rest, maybe I need to walk towards the pain and not try to avoid it. I am interested in the concept of internal strength the muscles that we can not see, the weights that people hold, carry and overcome, those that are societal, those that are social, those that are personal demons, the internal fights that can not be seen. That can not be labeled that can not be measured. The fact that they are unobserved goes to indicate just how much strength is concealed. That some of the biggest fights of humanity may have been at this level of invisibility. I’m in a perpetual warfare, it has different phases, it is epic like a Tolstoy novel. Ultimately there is no one who can come inside and join this war, everyone has their own battle. This is what makes this war such a impossible one to win. Yet on the other hand I guess there is a community warfare, that as others fight their war it helps others, that as we overcome the struggle to get up every morning, as we continue to fight for the respect of others, while we hold on to each other, while we all find ways to manage and negotiate these fights. There is community, but ultimately there are elements of the fight that are my own that no one can help me with, that maybe only god can see and support.

Does my heart have to break to be stronger? I don’ t know. I just need a place to rest and maybe this is the only place I can find it, here at the bottom of my heart.