The Social Gap: The disabled edition

Our life could be like the stock photo used below

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

A year into Legless, and I can see that so many of you are renewing your subscriptions and I am so, so grateful for that. It’s important for me to have you, and I hope that it’s important for you to have me.

As I get older, and edge closer to living more years in a wheelchair than not, I pick up on new perspectives, ones that were probably dulled by denial and shoved away in a mental filing cabinet labelled “Deal with later”. We all do it. I think.

I realise that I don’t review nearly as many accessible places as I should here, and I am giving myself a kick up the arse to improve on that from this weekend on. But as I shine up on these new perspectives, I realise that sometimes that physical element of places being accessible isn’t enough for disabled people to feel comfortable. There’s a social gap that exists, one that makes us feel like we never quite belong.

At the worst of times, the lines that swim through my brain are “I don’t exist”, “I’m nowhere”, and that’s what it feels like to look at the life I could be living if the world was more accessible. Note that I’m not saying if I wasn’t disabled.

The purpose of Legless is for the disabled people to feel connected and for non-disabled people to learn how they can do better. In this piece, I’m addressing The Social Gap, and I think we all need to take one step forward to close it.

Tl;dr: I’m launching an access survey for non-disabled people in the coming weeks, and I need you, the reader, to take part and share, share, share.