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Disability isn’t just a condition, but a societal expectation of performance
Pluto Rennie on “palatability”:
Because pain, as it turns out, is more acceptable when it is useful – when it can be turned into funding, into narrative, into something that circulates cleanly. What matters is not just that you suffer, but that your suffering can be told in a way that reassures people: about institutions, about care, about themselves. To object to that is to disrupt the story; and disruption is read as ingratitude.
Disability, then, is not just something you experience. It’s something you are expected to perform correctly. To present in a way that is legible, coherent, and above all, non-disruptive.
And like tone policing, this is ultimately about making some people easier to ignore:
The problem is that bodies are not coherent. They change. They contradict themselves. They have good days that undermine bad ones, and bad days that refuse to be hidden. They do not move in clean, linear narratives. They are inconsistent in ways that make other people uneasy. And so you are asked, quietly but persistently, to smooth that inconsistency out. To become easier to read. Easier to accommodate. Easier, ultimately, to ignore.
Further Reading
- A long list of accommodations for various disabilities, useful for anyone interested in making life easier for someone with a disability (including yourself!)
- Spoon theory is a mental model that explains how living with a disability can leave you with a fixed amount of energy or “spoons” in a day, and when you’re “out of spoons” it can be impossible to accomplish certain tasks.