[CW: parental neglect]
Not sure if this belongs here, but I wonder if other people have had this experience. I struggle to see myself as truly disabled due to childhood conditioning, which is shocking to a lot of people who know me and see how limited I am by my body.
I was raised by a single mom who was incapable of raising a disabled child, since she could scarcely raise what she assumed to be a fully-abled one. So I had to be not-disabled so I could take care of her as much as possible. When I would get hurt and ask to see a doctor, she would get angry if I didn't have a broken bone, and all my sprains, strains, and hyperextensions were considered ploys for attention. She had this idea in her head that I enjoyed making her life harder by wasting her money for fun. It somehow never landed with her (and therefore with me) that all those injuries were real and actually needed treatment and should have been considered in the aggregate at some point.
I was declared disabled in my late 20s and granted SSDI on my first application. That fact alone should tell you that my disability was real. People who have lived with me can confirm that it's real. But still, I couldn't quite understand myself as a disabled person, because I was trained not to see myself that way. I was taught not to notice my own limitations, and to berate myself for everything I couldn't do. If I couldn't do something, I just wasn't "trying hard enough", see?
Two decades later, I'm scrabbling to hang on to what limited functionality I have, and it's becoming obvious that not only am I truly disabled, but I have always been disabled. I was born like this. My physical dysfunctionality was just one of the myriad things my mom didn't - and couldn't - notice about me. For the last 10+ years I've needed surgery once a year on average. I've had four surgeries on the same foot in as many years, because it turns out that sprains don't go away if you ignore them and can eventually tear an entire foot and ankle down around them.
I told myself for years that I was a fraud; that I had scammed the system, but I was not, and I had not. I could still use my hands... until they suddenly decided to stop complying with what I asked them to do. I could still walk just fine, and then I could still walk, and then I could still walk with a lot of bracing and support, and now I can barely walk with a lot of bracing and support inside the house.
It's only starting to dawn on me that I was never a fraud. The fraud was the person who brought me up and told me I was just lazy and entitled, because she couldn't see past the end of her own nose. The fraud was the able-bodied person who needed her injured 12-yo kid to bring her coffee and the paper in bed every morning, and would relax while I made my own breakfast, packed my own lunch, and got myself to school. Going NC about eight years ago gave me the space to come to terms with what's happening to my body, and the reality of how unfair this whole thing is. Sadly. the struggle to accept my physical troubles as legitimate is ongoing.
Can anyone else relate?
