Sometimes I interact with people and it just sorta makes me go, "oh, I'm the first real interaction you've had with a young disabled person, huh?"
A bunch of my coworkers are older guys, and many are disabled themselves, from hip surgery or knee problems due to age.
Today, I had a dizzy spell and collapsed at work. Didn't even go fully unconscious, just fell. They sent me home from work promising to cover for me, and asked if I needed the next day off too.
They were terrified. I didn't have a real reason. They had gotten me to drink water and eat when I told them I was dizzy. I still went down, because neither of those were the reason. They had no idea why this was happening to me, and I kept telling them I was fine, that this happened often, that I just needed a Gatorade and a nap.
It didn't matter. They didn't realize, fully, this could happen to a seemingly normal, happy person. I wasn't the girl with fainting spells they had heard about. I was their baby college student coworker, and I just collapsed for no reason.
Sometimes, people can go for decades without understanding what disability really means. That I'm exactly like them.
What do they know about me?
I'm a twenty year old girl. I love to draw. I do Jiu Jitsu. I speak a little broken Spanish. I'm getting my degree in psychology. I like baking.
I can suddenly be in massive amounts of pain, for absolutely no reason at all.
To people who don't know better, those two realities don't intersect. Often the mental image of disabled people doesn't do much other than suffer, to someone who doesn't know much about them. I know, because those biases existed in me too. Still exist, to a degree, and they probably always will no matter how hard I work to fight them.
Just. A musing, I suppose. Strange sometimes that something so normal to me can be so terrifying to others.
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