A disabled friend was struggling to come up with good things about themselves last night and so I wrote them a very long message that listed a bunch of things and said the following about how ableism breaks is down. Sharing it for others it might help:

I think you are lovely lovely human in a harsh world that has done its best to try to break you and tell you you’re not enough and tell you you’re wrong and tell you that you’re less because of your disability.

And I think the weight of that is a lot. And I think the weight of that is what’s causing you to struggle with this. And I think the weight of that sometimes makes you feel like the shit the world says is real.

But I am more and more saying fuck that world. I’m saying that world can kiss my ass. I’m saying I want a big and beautiful and rich disabled fucking world where we get to decide our own value.

Where our love and care for each other is somehow enough - not to make up for the violence of the world to us - which is there and which scars us — but to offer a different idea of value. To create a new world and a different future and a better sense of our worth as humans.

Because you are a human who is valuable and beautiful. And so am I. And I am sick as fuck of everything that tells us otherwise and how the world makes us internalize that.

I want us to be able to take the ways the world has broken us and turn those broken fragments outward and cut the world as we move through it in order to rip it apart in a way that allows us to make a new world from its tatters where...

...you don’t need to text me that you can’t think of positive things about yourself because you know them. You just fucking know them.

We live in a world that continually erodes disabled people’s sense of self. You have nothing to apologize for. You are enough. You are more than enough. The world needs to apologize to you