The Price of Pride
Happy Pride month
Image: rainbow colored background with the text: asking when straight month is, is like asking where the non-disabled parking spots are.
I couldn’t love this image more. Because in my own way, I know that pride doesn’t come easily.
It took me over five years to take pride in my identity as a person with a disability. It took over half a decade for me to even claim the word disability, to not see it as a bad word. And since acquiring a disability, I feel a stronger kinship with others who are marginalized as well. I see their struggle more. I feel it. I feel seen by them. I see the light that forms where we intersect, on the canvas where our tears, our frustrations, our joy, all bleed into one cohesive cry.
Since becoming disabled, I hold a deeper respect for the things I will never understand about their experience, and for the ways I can understand better. The ways my own heart has broken from inequities I’ve faced has opened me up to the opportunities — and the need — of allyship within me. So this Pride month especially, I roll with extra love in my heart and for the Queer/LGBTQIA+ community, because I know that Pride isn’t some cute, trivial thing that just happens. It isn’t all Babs and spandex and glitter (although you can bet there will be a lot of that, and it will be cute AF)
The truth is, having pride for something that others fear and shame, something that has been treated inhumanely throughout history, something that we as the beholder are forced to fear ourselves — doesn’t come to life without a reckoning and risk.
Before I could start to love my disabled existence, I had to admit to myself that I was disabled. I had to identify how I was in my own way. And I had to let myself begin to see the beauty in it. I had to embrace my people. I had to understand my people and the world that WE live in, because it wasn’t the world that I grew up in as a non-disabled person. The rules weren’t the same, the privileges weren’t the same, the landscape wasn’t the same, the opportunities weren’t the same. Everything changed. And this the reality for any of us who live as marginalized people, in our own ways. Shit, this is the truth of living as a woman (including anyone who identifies as a woman) in this country, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
We have to put in serious work to see ourselves through compassionate, loving eyes amidst all the bullshit. We have to do the work to understand how the toxic culture sees us, in order to identify the ways it works to tear us down, so that we can protect ourselves properly against it.
Loving yourself and being proud of your marginalized existence in a culture that says you’re not “ideal” or you’re “unworthy” or worse…takes a lot of fucking work.
Pride takes courage and pain. It means knowing your inherent worth, or at least trying really fucking hard to — Every. Damn. Day. Pride requires celebration and joy, community, solidarity, and love. So much love.
Sending all my love to my Queer homies out there, wherever you are in your journey.
Happy Pride.
You’re hot AF and you have impeccable taste 🌈♿️✊💜
-KP