Bird’s Disabled Manifesto

I write this truth so all may understand the reality of Disability.

Disability is the one category, the one group, the one community that anyone can join at any time in their life for any reason. Disability is defined by people.

People can be born disabled. People may become disabled due to an infinite set of possible factors: Illness, injuries, accidents, disasters, work, play, and so on.

Disability is inclusive by default. People are of any skin color, any gender, any sexuality, any class, any nationality, any ethnicity, any religion, any disease, any illness.

Because anyone can enter into disability, it is inherently intersectional. All Disabled people have multiple identities that describe them and inform how they navigate the world. Thus we have to be intersectional so we can understand the multitude of oppressive systems that overlap and attack from multiple sides.

Disability is creative. Our survival in a world hellbent on making our lives miserable, impoverished, and painful requires us to create our own forms of joy and resistance. We build up mutual aids, underground communities, and organizing using the tools we have and create.

Disability intertwines with technology in that many of us must use the Internet, our phones, our computers to interact with others. Where we may need devices to breath, to sleep, to eat. Where we may need mobility aids to navigate the physical realm. Where we must use what we have and transform it into what we need. Many of us become cyborgs through our leverage of technology to ease our symptoms, pain, and to help foster our independence and connections. We require collective access, cross-movement solidarity, and a recognition of our wholeness outside of productivity or other measures.

Our needs are diverse, unique to each of us, and thus we burst forth with imaginative and creative ways to exist in spite of the world’s ableism. We lead with the most impacted, we pace ourselves, we balance our symptoms with our healthcare with our other work.

Celebrating Disabled means I am recognizing that Disability, the group in which I exist currently, the truth that I am Disabled does not mean I am less-than, but that I am whole even if society refuses to recognize that. My limitations may make navigating our society harder, but it pushes me to declare and demand a more equitable, just, sustainable, accessible society. The creativity of Disabled activists, our ways of surviving despite our limitations, our talents and skills, our personhood is all to be celebrated.

To become disabled is to enter into a world of diversity and creativity.

To become disabled is to enter into the resistance against oppressive systems that harm and disable and kill.

To become disabled requires us to reckon with society’s health supremacy lies. To realize bodies are diverse and unique in needs; to realize that everyone is deserving of love, of care, of support; to understand how everyone deserves to have their needs met. Holding onto bigotry harms and potentially kills us, and so that must be exorcised.

To become disabled is to enter into a journey of realization, of truth, of rediscovering who we truly are. We can’t hide from the limitations of our bodies and minds anymore. We must bravely face those limitations and find a balance so we can live another day.

Our body/minds are rich and brilliant as they are. As the Disabled, we discover how body and mind are interdependent. How we cannot separate them. We are our bodies, we are our minds, we are both/and.

Disability isn’t a cure. It cannot erase bigotry from our minds and bodies. It only redirects our gaze, intensifies the truth of our relations with one another, and whether we walk through that fire more compassionate and loving depends on our willingness to accept the uniqueness of one another, to let go of what no longer serves us. To grieve that former self, to exorcise the harmful socializations society instilled in us, and to open up one’s mind and body to one another’s truths.

Disabled and newly disabled and formerly disabled all have this chance to explore an alternate view of our reality. To see what has lain hidden under the oppressive systems that alienate, isolate, and exploit us. Some may bunker down within the bigotry society instilled in us, but others break free from that cage and be reborn into a fiery phoenix of relentless hope and compassion.

Our world is changeable. Nothing is set in impervious stone. It all can be broken down and repurposed.

Capitalism, cisgender-hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism — these are all disabling systems. They eat up people and spit them out, and only a privileged few escape the jaws of exploitation. Those privileged few fall prey to the greed and power that turns them into monstrous beasts that devour yet more of us in their quest for more wealth, more power, more prestige. They can no longer see us and them as human beings equal in body and mind, and instead see themselves as beyond-human.

They cannot be reasoned with. They can only be stopped. Violence and fear is their language.

For the Disabled, it is not fear and violence by which we live. It is not our suffering that defines all that we are. Our suffering is but one piece of our stories.

Disability is defined by our rich history, our unique stories, our creative will to live, to find a way to survive, to help one another survive, to speak our truths no matter how vicious others become. To call out the harm perpetuated against us, to demand the healthcare we need to live, to speak truth to our pain and our small joys.

We have persisted throughout history. It is our community, our compassion, our love, our fierce struggle to live that gives us a power the oligarchs and capitalists will never have.

We can defeat the monstrous beasts that exploit, devour, destroy, disable, kill. We can win through the bonds of our diversity, through the truth of our body/minds, through our interdependence on each other, through our support and our demand for justice.

We have won before: won rights, laws, building of technology that aids us.

We can win again.

Not in spite of our disability but because of our Disabled selves.