The Power of Pity: the offensiveness of using disability to gain sympathy.
“I feel sorry for you.”
My mind blanked out. It had been awhile since someone had said this to me.
I had forgotten how to respond.
I felt offended by this offering of sympathy that was, I am sure, meant to make me “feel better” about myself. It just made me feel crap though — it reminded me that I look very different to other people. It reminded me that my limb difference is what people judge me on every single day of my life.
I said the first thing that came into my mind, “please don’t feel sorry for me.”
“But I do, I really feel sorry for you.”
I knew exactly what this person felt sorry about. They felt sorry about the fact that I didn’t look like them. They felt sorry because they believed I was worse off in life than them. They felt sorry that, apparently, my body had somehow let me down.
What they failed to see was that I didn’t feel sorry for myself. And that it wasn’t my body that had let me down, but society. Through inaccessibility, exclusionary practices, and damaging tropes, disabled people still live in a world filled with discrimination and inequality.
