One Way to Be Less Ableist | The Neurodiverging Podcast

Danielle discusses what ableism is, gives an example of ableism that they experienced recently, and discusses opportunities to reduce our own internalized ableism.

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Transcript: One Way to Be Less Ableist | The Neurodiverging Podcast

Thank you to nakia h. for their work transcribing this episode!

DANIELLE: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to The Neurodiverging Podcast. My name is Danielle Sullivan, and I am your host and the founder of Neurodiverging Coaching, a sliding-scale coaching practice that you can learn more about at Neurodiverging.com.

Today I’m here by my lonesome to talk with y’all about ableism. We have been working on ableism inside the Patreon for a couple of months now, on and off, trying to understand what it is, how it affects us, where it is in society, and where it is in us, and it has been a very enlightening set of conversations for all of us and including myself. So, today I wanted to talk about one little piece of it for all of you and help us further the conversation about how ableism affects us as a society.

Before we dig into that, I do want to thank my patrons at Neurodiverging.com. The Group Coaching tier, especially, has helped me formulate some thoughts around this topic, but also all of our patrons support the podcast. We would not be able to do this work without them, I am so appreciative of them. If you would like to join us, please check out Patreon.com/Neurodiverging.

It’s not all internalized ableism all the time. We also have monthly social meetings, monthly game nights, an active parents group, and lots of other stuff going. Again, Patreon.com/Neurodiverging.

My experience talking about disability on social media

So, what started this particular thought process for me most recently is that I posted a video on my socials quite a while back explaining an aspect of my disability that I find troubling or difficult. I’m gonna be real vague about it on purpose because I don’t want y’all to go find that video and find the specific comments and delve into it. I talked about how an aspect of my complex (laughs) form of disability affects my daily life, and how I struggle emotionally with that, how I find it challenging emotionally about that.

And what happened was many people liked the video and shared the video and seemed to feel some empathy, compassion, and care, and also felt that their experience was reflected in my video, which is always good, right? Like it always feels wonderful to know that you’re not alone in the thing, but also what happened was that several, I think extremely well-meaning people, left comments giving me suggestions to how I could improve, and the suggestions were extremely kind of obvious suggestions.

And now, I know this happens a lot, right? Like,somebody posts about their chronic fatigue and somebody says, “Oh, have you tried yoga or drinking more water?” This is kind of what happened, except it was a little bit more complex, and the people who left those suggestions are also in the neurodivergence community in that they self-identified as neurodivergent on their social profiles when I went to look.

In this podcast, I am not interested in calling out those specific individuals who I know 100% were just trying to be helpful people, and I appreciate their interest and their care for me. What I do want to call out, though, is their kind of replication of ableism that happens a lot in social communities, but also widely, and that I think we need to talk about. So, let’s roll back a little bit and start off with, what is ableism? What does ableism mean?

What does ableism mean? How do people become ableist?

Ableism, at its root, is just a word that means or references the idea that disabled or neurodivergent people — I’m going to lump us together for the purposes of this conversation, okay, y’all? So just hang with me for a minute — disabled and/or neurodivergent people are somehow less human than neurotypical able-bodied people.

That’s what ableism means, just in a nutshell, okay? Disabled people are worth less to society than able-bodied people. Neurodivergent people are worth less to society than neurotypical people. This is ableism, right? Obviously, I hope, it is clear that ableism counters our social justice norms of all people have inherent worth and dignity. So, like racism, like misogyny, like classism, like colonialism, ableism is a social norm that’s sort of propagated through all of our structural policies in our country, that we learn very young, that as we say, racism is in the air around us. We breathe it in, we reproduce it without meaning to. And to counter ableism, we have to first be aware of what it is, second, notice it in ourselves, and third, notice it and try to push against it in society, okay?

So in ableism, neurodivergent people are worth less. Now, most of us actually in the neurodivergent community, I would say at least the wonderful folks who follow me on social, are primarily not people who, if you ask them, “Hey, who’s worth more?” would say, “Oh, clearly, it’s the neurotypical people.” Most of the people who follow me on social media and who interact with me and who talk to me, clearly believe, as I do, that there’s no difference in worth between different kinds of people, that all humans have inherent worth and dignity.

Competence and disability

There’s all sorts of ways that ableism perpetuates itself through society. One of these ways is this idea that neurodivergent people are not as competent as neurotypical people, that disabled people are not as competent as able-bodied people, right? Now, there’s a wide variety of competence across the human spectrum, right? There are all kinds of people. And so, yes, some of us are not competent, right? But that’s not related specifically to our ability or disability or our neurotype, right?

Competence is a trait and a set of traits and a complex (laughs softly) a complex structure in and of itself that doesn’t get linked to you specifically because you’re disabled or not disabled, right? It’s its own thing. So when we link a lack of competence only to disabled people or neurodivergent people, that is a form of ableism. What happened to me on social media was a really interesting case of people who mean well, who are themselves neurodivergent, who I’m pretty sure would never try to be ableist and don’t want to be ableist people, nevertheless, reproducing this idea that if I am having a problem that could maybe be solved, maybe I’m just not competent enough to solve the problem on my own.

And so they suggested the equivalent in this case of yoga and water (laughs). You know? And again, this is not about those specific folks who I believe are doing a thing — who are trying to be supportive in the community. This is about how we are taught to view neurodivergent people as incompetent people, as people who need help, as people who can’t make decisions on our own, who can’t find easy answers or strategies to some of our problems. So what that also does is reinforces this idea that disabled people are just not capable enough.

How Ableism Reinforces Capitalism

Part of the reason I point this out is because there’s a relationship here between ableism and individualism, and capitalism and colonialism, right? That I just want to make explicit for those of you who are still learning about this — And we’re all always learning about this, right? But for those of you who are still in the beginning stages of learning about ableism and what it is and what it’s like, we want ability or disability to be linked to our actions individually. We want to be able to control whether we are disabled or able-bodied, right? Now, as might be obvious, none of us can control whether we’re ever going to be disabled or not.

Most humans, at some point in their life, will be disabled. We want really hard because we’re individualists, and we’ve been trained that our health and our wellness are under our purview, we’ve been trained that if we’re not doing okay and we are disabled, that that’s our fault. And if we perform perfectly, if we do everything right, that maybe we can stave off disability. This is individualism, right? This is part of colonialism.

What this does in action is that it splits us back into able-bodied people being worth more than disabled-bodied people, and neurotypical people being worth more than neurodivergent people. If you have control over your destiny and you do everything perfectly, then you will never be disabled, and therefore you are a better person. You are worth more as a human than those people who are disabled because they must have done something to deserve it.

Almost none of us believe this consciously, especially if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re on my Instagram, right? There are certainly people in the world who do, but those of us in social justice work, almost none of us believe consciously that because we’re disabled, we must have deserved it, and therefore we are worth less, but it is what we are taught, and it is what we reproduce to other disabled people.

When people come on my Instagram and say, “Hey, have you thought of yoga or water?” And they are treating me as somebody who is not competent to solve problems in my own life, then they are saying, “I am someone who controls my disability narrative, I am someone who will never be disabled, and you are someone who is disabled and therefore is worth less and can be treated as incompetent.” You see?

Again, this is not conscious. This is not conscious behavior. This is not people doing it on purpose. But there’s still this baked-in stuff that we have to pull and tease and break! Okay? And I’m saying that we need to do the same thing with ableism, especially if you’re in this community, because you are talking to neurodivergent and disabled people every day, and you will do harm to neurodivergent and disabled people every day, and that is part of learning and being in community with each other. But wouldn’t it be nicer if we could recognize some of the harm we’re gonna do before we do it and nix it, right? As we’re all learning together?

Lateral ableism in action

So these comments are an example of ableism in action. The people who are commenting, like I said, probably don’t mean anything negative by their comments. They’re trying to be compassionate, they’re trying to have empathy for me, and they probably think they’re helping. But they are presuming that because they don’t have the same problems that I do — or that they have solved those problems — that they are somehow more competent than me, and thus they can be helpful by suggesting incredibly obvious solutions to an incredibly complex issue.

This is what divides us into those better than and less than categories. That assumption that because you do not have the same problems as somebody else, that you are more competent than they are. In most cases, that is not true. In most cases, most humans have similar levels of competence, or competence can be built as a skill. As a set of skills, right? And that’s something we do in coaching a lot, is build those skills. But just presuming incompetence as the reason that someone can’t solve a problem, as opposed to saying, “Well, maybe they know their lives better, and this is really a challenge,” that’s the part that I want folks who are listening to this to think about.

Do you ever do that? What else could you do instead? And just to lay this out very clearly, here is internalized ableism, this is the internalized ableism we are dealing with. And it rebuilds and rebuilds and rebuilds on itself, and the more that we perform it and allow ourselves to perform it, the more entrenched in society ableism becomes. The best thing we can do is notice, notice, notice any train of thought or any actions that assume that somebody else is less than you, okay?

All Humans Have the Same Inherent Value

No one else is less than you, and no one else is more than you. You are a worthy human being, and so are all these other humans in our midst. So, if we treat each other as worthy human beings first and say something like, “How can I help?” Or, “Do you want support?” Before just offering things because we presume incompetence, that is one really easy way to break this ableist cycle, right? Just ask people. We’ll tell ya! Right? And to notice, in what other cases are you potentially presuming incompetence where it may not exist? Right? In what cases are you presuming that somebody is just not as good as you? And could we counter that?

In what other cases are you presuming that you’re not as good as somebody else? And can we counter that? That’s part of internalized ableism, too, and that’s much more what we’ve been working on in the group coaching inside the Patreon, is how do we recognize when we are not holding ourselves up to that, we have inherent worth and dignity piece. Because you do and you’re allowed (laughs) to access things in society despite being disabled. Okay.

So, I hope this was a helpful conversation for you, and I hope it helped you think through some issues. If you have questions, if you have further discussion points, I would love if you left a comment or emailed us at contact@neurodiverging.com, or come into the Patreon! Join our Group Coaching tier, and let’s talk about it more together. I would reall — I love talking about this stuf, this is my jam. So, we’re at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging. And thank you again to my patrons for supporting this podcast and supporting all of our work in thinking through these very uncomfortable and also important problems as we work together for further social justice. Thanks for being here today. Check us out more at Neurodiverging.com, and please remember, we are all in this together.