Member-only story
Please don’t call me “differently abled”
Please don’t call me “differently abled”
Please don’t call me “differently abled”. It’s not that I am abled in the same way as you. I’m not. But no two people are. I’m disabled. I’m disabled in a few ways, but the main one is that I have nonverbal learning disability.
But I am ahead of myself.
What is a disability?
Different people define “disability” differently There are legal definitions, but I am not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV. Different groups of disabled people have different definitions. School systems may have definitions. Here is my definition:
A disability is something that disables you. That is, it makes it difficult or impossible for you to do something that most people do easily.
Disability is context specific. For a lot of European history, dyslexia was not important, because almost no one could read. There are some languages that have no traditional written form (although they may have adopted one later on).
What is my disability?
As I said, I have nonverbal LD. That’s a terrible name for it; it makes people think I am nonverbal. Actually, we NLDers tend to be adept verbally. We are bad at lots of nonverbal stuff. Which stuff varies from one…
