I Have Been Disabled My Entire Life. I Still Don’t Know What I’m Supposed to Do With Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month.

And I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

I have been disabled my entire life. There was no accident that divided my life into a before and an after. There was no moment when I had to learn how to become a disabled person. I did not wake up one morning and suddenly have to adjust to a new identity.

This has always been my life.

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I have always known what it feels like to have people notice something about me before they know anything about me.

Before they know that I am an author.

Before they know that I built a publishing company.

Before they know how many books I have written, how many children I have worked with, how many ideas live in my head, or how hard I have worked to create a career for myself.

They see the wheelchair.

And sometimes, without ever saying a word, they decide what the rest of the story must be.

That is a very strange thing to experience for an entire lifetime.

I Don’t Have an Inspirational Disability Story

At least, not in the way people often want disabled people to tell one.

I cannot give you a dramatic story about how I “overcame” my disability.

I still have it.

I cannot tell you that determination made my physical limitations disappear.

It did not.

I cannot wrap my life in a beautiful bow and tell you that everything happens for a reason, because there have been moments when being disabled has been frustrating, unfair, isolating, and exhausting.

There have been doors I could not physically enter.

There have also been doors I was qualified to enter, but someone on the other side looked at me and decided I did not belong there.

Those doors hurt differently.

After college, I went on interviews. I had the education. I had the skills. I had worked hard.

But I also had a wheelchair.

I learned very quickly that people could be impressed with me on paper and become uncertain about me in person.

I learned how a conversation could change.

I learned how quickly someone’s eyes could move from my face to my chair.

I learned what it felt like to know I was capable and still watch someone question my capability without ever asking me a meaningful question about it.

Eventually, I stopped waiting for someone to give me a seat at the table.

I built my own table.

Ironically, I brought my own chair too.

But Am I Proud to Be Disabled?

This is where Disability Pride Month gets complicated for me.

Am I proud of my disability?

I don’t know if that is the right question.

I am proud of me.

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I am proud of the woman I became while navigating a world that was not always designed with me in mind.

I am proud that I learned how to create when traditional opportunities did not always make room for me.

I am proud that the little girl who could not find herself in enough stories grew up and started putting children who are often overlooked into books.

I am proud that I built Purple Diamond Press.

I am proud every time I visit a school and a child looks at me with curiosity instead of pity.

I am proud when children ask me questions.

Yes, even the blunt ones.

Especially the blunt ones.

Children will ask what adults spend twenty minutes trying not to ask.

“What happened to your legs?”

“Can you walk?”

“Why do you use that?”

And I answer them.

Because curiosity is not cruelty.

A child trying to understand me is very different from an adult deciding who I am without even trying to understand me.

Maybe that is why so much of my work centers on kindness, inclusion, curiosity, and being seen.

I know what the absence of those things feels like.

Being Seen Is Different From Being Looked At

I have been looked at my entire life.

Being looked at and being seen are not the same thing.

That distinction has shaped more of my work than I probably realized when I first became an author.

It shaped SEEN.

It shaped the children I insist belong in illustrations.

It shaped the stories Purple Diamond Press publishes.

It shaped my belief that representation is not a publishing trend or a box to check during a particular awareness month.

It is a human need.

There is a particular loneliness in searching for yourself in stories and repeatedly coming up empty.

Or worse, finding someone who looks like you only to discover that their entire character exists to teach everyone else a lesson about bravery.

Disabled children deserve adventures.

They deserve friendships.

They deserve to be funny.

They deserve to make mistakes.

They deserve to be stubborn, imaginative, loud, quiet, curious, and complicated.

They deserve stories where the wheelchair is in the illustration and not the conflict.

I think I needed those stories too.

Maybe that is why I write them now.

Please Don’t Call Me an Inspiration for Existing

I know people usually mean well.

I really do.

But disabled people have a complicated relationship with the word “inspiring.”

Sometimes I have done something inspiring.

I will gladly accept that.

Building a company was hard.

Writing books is hard.

Continuing after rejection is hard.

Creating something from nothing takes work.

Be inspired by the work.

Be inspired by the persistence.

Be inspired by the fact that I kept building when it would have been easier to stop.

But please do not be inspired because I went to the grocery store.

Please do not congratulate me for showing up somewhere.

Please do not turn an ordinary moment in my life into evidence of extraordinary courage simply because I completed it while disabled.

Sometimes I am just living.

And I would like the freedom to be ordinary too.

So, What Does Disability Pride Mean to Me?

Maybe it means I no longer feel responsible for making other people comfortable with my existence.

Maybe it means I can acknowledge the difficult parts of disability without betraying the disabled community.

Maybe it means I do not have to pretend I love every part of this experience in order to love myself completely.

Maybe pride is not pretending the barriers do not exist.

Maybe pride is knowing they exist and refusing to let other people’s assumptions become my identity.

I am disabled.

I am a wheelchair user.

I am an author.

I am a publisher.

I am a business owner.

I am creative.

I am stubborn.

I am ambitious.

I am still learning.

I am all of those things at the same time.

My disability does not need to disappear from my story for the rest of my story to matter.

And perhaps that is what I want to say this July.

I do not need a month to remind me that I am disabled.

I have never been allowed to forget.

But maybe Disability Pride Month can remind the rest of the world that disabled people are not here solely to inspire you, educate you, or prove what is possible.

We are here to live.

To work.

To create.

To lead.

To make mistakes.

To build things.

To tell our own stories.

And, sometimes, to build our own tables.

Chair included.

— C.M. Harris