disability pride month

July is disability pride month. I hadn’t ever heard of it nor seen the accompanying flag before last week. Over the past week I’ve reflected extensively on my experiences around disclosing my speech impediment and what exactly it meant to me to be proud of my disability. 

The idea was jarring at first, how can I be proud to be disabled? For most of my life, my speech impediment has been a point of shame, something to be tucked away behind the rest of my person. I feared that I would become defined by my speech impediment. I didn’t want to be the kid with a speech impediment all the time, sometimes I just wanted to be plain Ed. So knowledge of my stutter became privy and on a need-to-know basis.

It was only recently that I publicly announced my status as a disabled person and it was a watershed moment, a sort of reconciliation with my internal anxieties. To be proud of my disability is to take it one leap further, to unashamedly adopt my disability into my person wholly and completely. I’m not sure if I’m at that point of acceptance yet, but seeing the advocacy that is being done by other members of the disabled community is tremendously heartwarming. 

To me personally, this month is about learning to love my unique voice and acknowledging that even on the days that I don’t, I still am worthy of belonging. I’m extremely happy to see that attitudes towards disability are shifting and that I have the option to be public and proud about my disability. The disabled community is not as visible as others, but this month is a chance for everyone to listen to and uplift disabled voices. So this month, I encourage you to think about what disability means to you and how you can support the disabled community. Let’s celebrate disability pride month together.

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Ed