What does disability mean: personal perspectives

MYROSLAVA: I would say that disability is very largely a social construct. It’s also a way of labelling a very, very wide range of people who all are somehow interconnected by the experience of having a body that for one reason or another, doesn’t quite perform in the way that we expect it to perform. So it’s a very, very, very diverse identity, a diverse bunch of people and of experiences. But there is that shared experience of just sometimes living in a world that doesn’t seem to be built for you, but also, living with a body that just somehow doesn’t work the way you want it to.

DEUS: Everybody has different disabilities. And every person is affected differently. So the way one is affected is not the same way another person is affected. So my needs are not somebody’s needs too. So comparing the two may be hard.

KIM: Disability, I would describe as like, for instance, we are normal. We can do certain things that sighted people can do. But we do things a little bit different than the sighted people, such as writing and reading.

RIDA: I feel it’s more society that makes me disabled. Lack of access to public infrastructure, places like universities for example, the mall, movies– malls, shops, things like that are not very accessible for me. And I say I feel more disabled by what the environment ables me to do.

RICHARD: The idea of disability for me is that it disabled me to live my full life. It was like having a major, major rock on my shoulders. And at times, looking into a deep, deep black hole. And that wasn’t living, that was just existing. And that, for me, was the disability that I wasn’t able to live life to its full, and to enjoy life and experience life.

GADIJA: I am a blind person, a very proud one. But it’s taken a long time for me to say that I’m a proud blind person.

BRANDON: If you look at it generally, disability would be that there’s some type of impairment to a person if they’re sitting down, or they’re visually impaired, or whatever. But personally, with me, it’s more mindset. So disability is only as strong of a word as what you make it out to be.