disability, feminism and campagining

When talking about long-term conditions/impairments there is a tendency to talk about the individual being on a road to recovery. Where recovery is a mystical place in which the individual will once more be “the person they were before developing a condition/impairment”. Now that’s a huge ask! If you were to ask a non-disabled person to be like the person they were five years ago they’d struggle a lot.

I think we can look at recovery from two different angles,firstly the removal of physical impairment and then there is a mental recovery, the idea that one will forget the rubbish they’ve been through with their health and go back to being a “normal” non-disabled person. At this point though I think we have to drop the pretence that recovery is ever going to get you back to how you used to be. It is more that recovery is the road to becoming non-disabled. Something that’s not possible for many of us, and for those in doubt I’m going to look at the idea of recovery from a physical and mental standpoint now. Continue reading →