Foreword
Adam is one of those people who makes you feel comfortable enough to be your whole self immediately. This is a rare type of person to find. When you live in our burning world as a weirdo, you hold on to these folks with the same preciousness reserved for your favourite rocks, trinkets, and songs. I first spent time with Adam at a photoshoot for a mutual friend’s clothing line. I bet you were unaware of their side-hustle as a model. We shared belly-laughs with a group of friends on an urban farm and I knew I’d found a new pal. I noticed soon after we added each other on social media that Adam was very open about their recovery as an alcoholic and about the work he has done to be sober. I continue to feel his authenticity and vulnerability in the art they bring into existence, including the words on these pages. There are a lot of things to admire about Adam, but this definitely comes out high on the list.
To proudly and publicly identify as sober in the way that Adam has usually means to acknowledge one’s past mistakes. To do this is profoundly courageous. We exist in a society that leaves little room for fuck-ups. Many on the radical left spend energy and resources on in-fighting, and dare I say, the policing of those who have been imperfect. Yet, to err is not only the truth of people who struggle with addictions. It is the human condition, I dare you try to disprove me on that one. There are few things I would universalize to all of humanity, but making mistakes is certainly one of them. Whether intentionally or not, (often this is a blurred distinction), we are going to cause harm. We are going to hurt people.
I think about this often. For example, as a student and teacher of gender studies and queer theory, I am ashamed of the history of white feminism. I am embarrassed of the way white ciswomen have centered themselves and replicated a hierarchy of power that continues to marginalize anyone else. But you know what feels more shameful? Not acknowledging this past and pretending “perfect” social justice is a possibility. This is not to suggest that these harms are justifiable, but that stumbling blocks are an inevitable truth. In these movements we can learn from our histories to do better, we can also urge this of the individuals within these movements. However, what many of us fail to recognize is that there is a significant contextual difference between a larger cultural movement and an individual who is usually existing within multiple interstices of marginalization. Adam illustrates this powerfully through his experiences of internalized ableism. We must demand feminism and disability studies and queer theory, etc. etc, do better and be better. But the expectation has been placed on the individual to never fuck-up, to never err, for fear of ostracization from a movement that demands perfection. How, then, would we acknowledge our vulnerabilities? Our infallibility? Our capacity for change? And where does our community go?
If I did not wholeheartedly believe that humans could learn from their mistakes and grow, I wouldn’t be in this line of work; If we want the world to be a better place, we have to believe people can do better. As Adam suggests throughout this essay, part of challenging the cis-hetero-capitalist-colonial-racist-ableist-patriarchy means reflecting on how it has shaped us, and what we can do to unravel and destroy these harmful knowledge cycles that have been passed through generations. Adam shows us the importance of doing this through their own experience.
At the same time, we can only do better when we have community support and a shared understanding that we will always be flawed. Adam’s self-growth and capacity to do better was exponential when they found that community. I am proud to be a recovering fuck-up in a community with other fuck-ups who have also been compassionate and strong enough to own their mistakes and move forward. We recognize our fallibility. Indeed, I’m proud of my pal, Adam, for being so open about their mistakes. It’s part of why I feel so comfortable being myself around them. I will support Adam and any other weirdo fuck-up as long as they remain willing to learn, grow, and care for others in their communities. It’s the only way to go.
Amy Keating, MA
PhD Candidate
Contract instructor
Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Beyond Ableism
“Ableism is discrimination and social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities and/or people who perceive themselves as being disabled. Ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people.”
– Wikipedia, The all knowing
Hello, my name is adam and I am a recovering ableist and alcoholic. Something I learned the hard way on my road of recovery is that there is no shame to be found in “being” an alcoholic, especially a sober one. Where that shame lies is in the past, or most specifically in the decisions I made in my active alcoholism. After putting a lot of work into myself, I am far less ashamed of the decisions I am making today,.
All this is to say that I still make mistakes. The difference now is I know there is no shame in apologizing, learning from, and taking ownership of my mistakes. I can move beyond them; I can grow and become a better person from the experience. Some people say that is making a positive out of a negative, but I think that is a really fucking cheesy way of saying it. I acknowledge that even though I am sober from alcohol, I am still an alcoholic and that if I drink I will bring that negativity back into my life.
The tough reality I find now is that even though I have worked incredibly hard on my ableist behaviour (both internalized and external), I am still an ableist. This is true despite being connected to the disability community in a way that I have never been before. I try to read every book I am suggested on Disability. I watch every show or movie that has great disability representation. Yet, I can still fall back on some very toxic ableist behaviours and opinions. These moments happen far less frequently than they once did, but I accept that I am a work in progress. I have much more I still need to learn, and I will continue to learn until my dying day.
By having to live in a society that has been designed to exclude my body (buildings, sidewalks, and transportation) and mind (stereotypes, misinformation, and discrimination), I learned from an early age the many ways in which I have no value in a settler-colonial capitalist framework. This lens was how I learned to hate myself. Even within my own family unit I was the black sheep, being the only one in our house with disability. I subconsciously developed many unhealthy coping mechanisms in order to survive. My sense of humour may be the only one which has affected my life in any positive sense. By far the worst mechanism was my internalization of society’s unrelenting projection of ableism on my bodymind.
My mother recently shared with me what may have been my first act of ableism which occurred when I attended a preschool for children with disability. Up until that point in my life my experience with disability outside of my own (multiple fractures and surgeries) was at a handful of conferences for people with the same diagnosis as me. I seemed somewhat accustomed to people with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (more commonly known as OI or Brittle Bone Disorder), however when I ended up in the preschool classroom I found myself surrounded by individuals within the broad spectrum of disability. The classroom was a bit of a system overload for me, but I seemed to really focus in on a specific classmate of mine who has the diagnosis of cerebral palsy (CP). As a person with CP his motor skills and speech are affected in a way that I really hadn’t witnessed before. He used a large, and to my young mind, menacing custom wheelchair. Keep in mind this was the 1980’s so all devices were twice the size and three times as ugly as they are today. I began to connect him and his disability directly to his assistive devices.
Up until that stage in my life, when I was not recovering from a break or a surgery, I was able to use a walker for short distances, or more often my trusty Fisher Price plastic trike to get around. As I continued to grow. My parents, knowing that the trike phase couldn’t last forever, started to make suggestions about me getting my own wheelchair. A suggestion I flat out wouldn’t even consider this suggestion; I would dismiss it by throwing a tantrum while saying “I don’t want to be like my classmate.” For me, using a wheelchair meant I was one of “them.” Sure, this is easily dismissed by a child’s limited ability to reason logically that a device does define who you are, but it now serves as a starting point for my cognitive awareness of my own internalized ableism. I wouldn’t actually know what that term meant until thirty years later. For the time being I felt that if I could ride my Fisher Price trike everywhere, surely no one would notice my disability. I only stopped using it when I started the second grade.
This touches on something that is rarely talked openly about outside of the disability community: there is an unspoken ableist class structure of disability hierarchy. Some folks with disability are perceived as better than others because of how their diagnosis affects their daily life. Generally those at the top of the pyramid are acknowledged to have the most cognitive and physical ability, and at the bottom are the folks with seemingly the least. This class structure is based in settler colonialism, and more specifically capitalism. Within this framework, a bodymind holds no inherent value unless it is able to generate money, and the more money it can generate the more value it holds. Even recently, people will ask me things like: “but you’re not that kind of “disabled” are you?” They offer air quotes while they say it to me, as if we are sharing the same prejudices, and are sharing an acceptance of the hierarchy of disability. Up until a few years ago, I would shrug this off and simply laugh and say “oh no, not like”that “.”
As a young person, Being the only one in my school with a physical disability meant I didn’t need to really address this class system inside of the classroom. In truth, I can only remember one instance where someone actually made fun of me at school, and it was a misunderstanding. It was overheard by the teacher’s assistant, who reported it to the principal. It is now so long ago that I completely forget what it was all about, but we both got called into the principal’s office. I had to sit there while my friend was forced to apologize to me through his tears, and I explained I understood and forgave him. It seemed very performative for the adults in the room. The whole thing now speaks volumes to how adults project their own concepts of disability onto children. It is this harmful perspective that has been passed on for generations. We need to actively work on breaking this ableist cycle.
High school was a big game changer on the ableism front. On the first day of grade nine I was introduced to Johnny, the person who would bully me throughout high school and beyond. As an attempt to ease the transition from grade to high school, my school had adopted a structure of one set group of students who would go from class to class together. It was within the first month or so of starting school that Johnny unprovokedly stole and then proceeded to rip up my dollar store pencil case in front of the class while the teacher was out of the room. I have no idea why he chose that day, moment, or item to act out that way, but Johnny treated it like the opening day of hunting season. I was somewhat oblivious to what had actually happened.I had zero emotional connection to the pencil case and was kind of happy the ugly thing was out of my life. Yet, the adults forced Johnny to buy me a new pencil case and apologize to me in front of the class. This apology felt pointless because he didn’t mean it and only brought more unwanted attention towards me. In addition, this only angered him and he saw it as a reason to double down on his bullying of me. This was when he started whispering things to me in class after I would answer a question. “Shut up ret*rd.” “Think you’re so smart eh cr*pple?” “Stop being such a f*ggot.” It was mostly the same dismissive comments with whatever slur seemed popular to him that day.
Once grade nine was over and I didn’t have to sit in every class with him all day every day, things actually got unexpectedly more complicated. It was a small school and our social groups weren’t that big so there was a lot of overlap in our circles. A lot of my close friends ended up being friends of Johnny, or at least friends of his best friends. While the classroom comments still kept coming, now I had to find ways to pretend to be cool with it. What better way to do this than to internalize it all and lash out at other folks I thought were lower on the ableist class pyramid than me.
I have talked about my disassociation from disability in my previous essays, that it happened around the same time as my transition from being a camper to counselor at a camp for people with disability, and my first experiences with alcohol. This drastic change in my peer group also allowed me the opportunity to climb the all important class pyramid. There was another factor that came into play I haven’t really explored as it tied into my school bullying situation. But, “hurt people, hurt people” and sometimes we act out in the harshest ways to communities we are most tightly connected to.
Midway through highschool they converted a wing of the school to be the new home of the “special education program” which was being moved from an obsolete facility. This opened up a whole new realm of potential material for Johnny and his buddies to bully me with. I was now constantly being told I was in the wrong classroom. When I spoke, things I said would be mimicked to have a speech impediment and hand motions similar to those made by folks who have cerebral palsy. Sometimes these things were being shouted in order to silence me, or just making the hand gesture at me when they wanted to silent.
Although I now regret the decisions I made, at the time I thought my best tactic was to join in the mockery of the new wing of students as an effort to deflect the attention from me. I tried to make them realize that I was not like “them” and that I was as “normal” as Johnny and his football buddies. It may have taken the wind out of their sails a little, but it didn’t bring the torment to an end. I certainly was never going to be acknowledged as an equal. In hindsight, all this did was further my ableism and disassociation from my identity as a person with disability. I caused more harm than good in my wake.
Eventually I graduated highschool and went to college, a fresh start. I doubled down on my efforts not to be considered disabled, or at least not like one of “them.” However, I still wasn’t free of Johnny. During those first few years out of high school, we would still run into each other at parties because we had so many common friends. He still found ways to assert his dominance over me, such as pouring a full beer over my head at one party we were at, and stealing two full bottles of alcohol from my parent’s house at another. The latter of which I caught him doing and he just strong armed me away from the trunk of his car and continued to deny it all, both the theft and bullying me. Luckily, over time I made new college friends, and slowly stopped socializing with my highschool friends shedding the skin of my identity as a person with disability and Johnny once and for all.
Despite trying to distance myself from my disability during this time, I obviously still acknowledged I was a wheelchair user. But, I relished in the feeling of joy when my friends would say things like “I don’t even see you as disabled.” Though outwardly I was trying to ascend in the class system, the harsh reality was that no matter how hard I tried, society was always there to project its ableism onto me. This was when I really started using alcohol to push down all that cognitive dissonance to live in this new reality I had created. While sitting on a patio of a neighbourhood pub I couldn’t enter with my wheelchair, I would criticize people with disability I knew for complaining too much. They needed to accept the reality that the world wasn’t going to change for them, and they needed to stop whining so much. I completely ignored the irony of this situation.
I became so lost in my ableism that I was willing to fight to remain in a toxic relationship, just so I could feel loved for once. Even though that person they loved was not the true version of myself. I was so far gone that I didn’t realize how much I hated myself. How little self confidence I had. I was convinced I truly had no worth in this world, and to cope with that darkness I drank. Though I wasn’t drinking every day (yet), I did lose all control of my drinking in search of oblivion. In that darkness I was free of all the guilt, shame and lack of honesty to myself. A lot of alcoholics will say that they started drinking because it was fun or that it worked to help them unwind, until it didn’t any more. After losing my job, my relationship, my place to live, and my self respect, that is exactly where I found myself. At the bottom of a bottle.
“When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.”
– Peace Pilgrim, Mildred Lisette Norman
With nowhere left to turn, I got sober. I read the book Unf*ck Yourself by Gary John Bishop and learned that I was the biggest thing standing in my own way of changing. I reread Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates and witnessed what systems of oppression can do to the bodyminds of those marginalized and discriminated against. I read the memoirs of folks with disability, and learned what living in their individual bodyminds meant to them and how they identified with disability. Though it wasn’t until a tinder date turned good friend lent me their copy of Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha that something clicked in me. I started to fully realize how I had gotten to where I was and in what direction I needed to work towards. I didn’t stop there though. I kept reading more about disability. As I began to feel more comfortable in my own bodymind, I started finding ways of accepting myself, and dare I even mutter the words… love myself. The book The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor helped with that as well.
Where did all of this shame and self loathing start, though? Obviously, I wasn’t the first person to find myself in a situation like this. The good news was that there are a million other people who are far more educated on this topic than me, and they all have written about it in great length. I am going to try and simmer it down to the basics, some of which I already covered in my previous essays.
There is a book that a lot of people have invested a lot of time and energy into that tells them that they are “God’s chosen people.” For millennia these people have used those words as justification for why they should have supremacy over all, and to claim things as their own. Most troubling, they feel that they have the god given right to kill people who disagree with their beliefs. They went on to use this mindset to steal land from those they determined to be unworthy of it; to enslave bodyminds they claim to be told are lesser than themselves. Then, they wrote laws to give themselves the undeniable jurisdiction over everything they claim to be given by god. In order to maintain this supremacy in the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (to quote our neighbours to the south), systems of oppression were created and maintained. For hundreds of years these systems removed the rights of those deemed lesser by incarcerating, mutilating, maiming and killing.
While all of this was happening a global phenomena named Capitalism was sweeping the world. Those already benefiting from these created systems of oppression continued to climb the social and financial pyramids on the backs of those under them. Further laws were passed to ensure their class supremacy in the hierarchy. Eventually the oppressed populations were seemingly being given freedoms and rights, yet laws to ensure they could never achieve true equality were continuing to be written. Regulations around wages, wealth, property and even physical movement were passed. The ugly laws of the 1880’s stand as a shining example of this, making it illegal for any one seemingly impoverished or disabled to even be seen in public, punishable by incarceration/institualization. Even though laws like these were repealed in the 1970’s the long standing effects are still easily witnessed to this day. People who identify as female, bipoc, LGBTQ2S+ and disabled statistically make up the highest percentage of people incarcerated, institutionalized or impoverished.
Outside of the obvious devastation this oppression has left, the most frustrating thing to witness is the infighting that happens within these communities keeping them largely distracted from advocating for real systemic change. I for one am a shining example of this. I spent over twenty years of my life chasing a dream I drunkenly thought was easily obtainable. Hell, I even have the privilege of being a masculine presenting white person going for me and I still fucked it all up. Why? Because I was lying to myself about who I was the entire time. I was too focused on throwing others under the bus in hopes that I could better my social class status. I believed the lie that others thought of me as an equal, only to have others throw me under the same bus. It really is a snake eating its own tail.
So how the fuck do we start breaking this cycle? One suggestion is that we stop looking to fix the problems created by a system, with the same system that created them in the first place. If we look at the Canadian penal system as an example, they are in the process of eliminating and limiting the use of solitary confinement within prisons. Yes this needs to happen, as the UN even considers it torture, but this does nothing to address the damage being done by the prison system. Leaving folks feeling disenfranchised by society, and often leading them to reoffend. This issue disproportionately affects the BIPOC communities, in Canada it particularly affects indigenous communities. Who make up 3% of the population but make up more than 25% of folks in custody, a rate even higher for indigenous women. Changes like these don’t address the larger systemic issues at play, and we must look outside of the current framework to find them.
Not only must we look outside of the current framework to solve the larger issues within our society, but we must do the same to start the healing at a community level as well. The pressures those of us in marginalized communities have been living under have not only led us to lash out and sabotage ourselves, but also to ostracize and excommunicate when one of us falters. Yes – an individual needs to be accountable for their actions, but if we are going to come together as a community to rise above this systemic oppression we must also learn to forgive ourselves, as well as each other. For there is strength in numbers, and we become fewer and fewer when we continue to completely write each other off as lost causes.
If we are coming to the table hoping to advocate for large systemic change, we also need to hold space for accepting that there are many things we still have to learn and change within ourselves. One of the greatest mistakes we can make is to fool ourselves that we know everything there is to know. We then feel confident in making judgment calls on other people’s thoughts or actions. In reality, things change. Knowledge bases grow. Hell, the science we accepted as fact in the 1950’s is largely laughable now. This evolution is natural though, it happens, and we have to accept it and should never weaponize it against others, especially those in our community. Given that we live in a toxic swamp of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia etc, we must hold space for folks to grow into new understandings of how their learned toxic behaviours impact others.
All this being said, we shouldn’t roll over and accept half measures and compromises from those in power of the systems of oppression we are challenging for inclusion and rights. Instead if we keep in mind that the people we are talking to don’t understand what we are really asking for just to be seen as a peer or equal. We can then try to bring them into our community and educate them with knowledge based on our collective shared life experiences.
There is an older gentleman who attends a meeting I chair that will often say “No person is completely useless; they can always serve as a bad example.” Something he often says about himself, and how far he has come in his journey. Here I want to use secular AA (the version which isn’t focused on religiosity, but on recovery) as an example. It is a group of individuals who have made about as wide of a variety of mistakes as possible, that come together to help one another by sharing their experience, strength and hope. We hold each other accountable to heal and to grow through our recovery. Holding space to help each other as we stumble along the way. We can’t possibly be everything for everyone, but if we show up with peace, love and understanding we might be able to help each other on the way to burning down and rebuilding the fucking shitshow of a god damn circus we call our society.
“So why don’t we start making a history worth being proud of and start fighting the real fucking enemy?”
– Propagandhi, The Only Good Fascist Is a Very Dead Fascist
