One sentence stuck with me :
Finally, I feel my pain is truly understood.
This sentence echoes the idea that when pain is invisible, it cannot be fully understood or taken into account as a disability and would require extra explanation or convincing by the person suffering just echo with me and make me ask how many times I discarded pain experience from people I encountered?
This thought scares me deeply, as in a very physical world which ingrained an “able” culture, we become more and more resistant to the idea of disabling pain that we cannot see, which is a “can-do attitude” that pushes us to restrain our possibility to empathy with ” Im sorry I can’t”.
I cannot deny that it has happened as a tutor that I asked students to push through deadlines without questioning their resistance to pain and I feel this article touches a part of me that I would like to address, this idea that we can all challenge this forever high performant society model by being more careful of the full experience of each student.
Perhaps this “forget your pain and push through attitude” is from my intersectional experience of being a person of colour, an immigrant and a woman and my education of “no excuse” in an ultra capitalistic society of “do it” which has turned me as part of the oppressor and need to be generationally addressed as a systemic problem as well.
One response to “Deaf Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons from Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee’ by Khairani Barokka”
Your blog entry and use of the quote made me reflect further on the ableist culture we live and work in. These attitudes are so deeply engrained in us that we all need a process of un/learning unless. It was inspirational to see you write in such a self reflective way – you mention asking students to push through and then reflect on where this attitude might have been developed from personally. I like to state I am interested in slow pedagogy but in truth I know it’s at odds with the curriculum and ethos under which we teach. That is the bigger picture that your blog made me think on and like you said this needs to be “generationally addressed as a systemic problem as well”.