Climbing A Mountain of Disability Stigma in the Media

My greatest fear has long been that I am not enough of a “supercrip” to impress society. I’ll admit it. I’ve made several attempts to disprove this to the world, and myself, trying anything and everything to show what I’m capable of doing as a disabled woman. About four years ago, while on a trip to Israel, I rappelled down Mount Gilboa (with a skilled guide helping me down). Even though I can’t say I loved doing it, I was content to be able to say I did it. People thought it was badass. “I don’t even have a disability, and I’d never do that,” continues to be a common response from non-disabled people when I tell the story. Because of this, for quite some time, it made me feel like I had defied society’s perceptions of what it means to be disabled, and that seemed to me to be a positive thing.

I’ve since come to realize that this line of thinking is deeply problematic. Far too many disabled people have internalized society’s notions about what it means to live life as a disabled person. That is, there’s no middle ground when it comes to having a disability; there are only extremes. If we’re not finding ways to push past our disabilities and show that we can adaptively leap tall buildings in a single bound, our lives must be nothing more than tragic.

The media perpetuates this idea constantly, and it’s a total confidence drain. Consider this: my mother – who has the same physical disability as I do – is smart, beautiful, and accomplished in her own right. However, while spending a quiet day catching up on a recent episode of the news show 60 Minutes, she watched a feature about The Heroes Project, which is an initiative for injured veterans to scale the world’s highest mountains. Conceptually, the project really does seem like an empowering means of rehabilitation. And yet, because of the way the story was presented, my mother shared with me that by the end of the segment, she had begun focusing on feelings of inadequacy.

It’s a feeling I know all too well. Were we nothing but a couple of disabled failures, sitting in our living room chairs talking about a television show instead of climbing a massive mountain? Are we not doing enough to show society that our disabilities don’t stop us?

Of course, I know somewhere deep inside me the answer to this is a resounding “no.” We have nothing that we need to prove. But that’s not the message that came across from the 60 Minutes story. Instead, in interviewing the founder of The Heroes Project, Tim Medvetz, news anchor Lara Logan unearthed stigmas against disabilities so bluntly that it actually stung to hear them.

Medvetz was motivated to begin The Heroes Project after summiting Mt. Everest as part of his rehabilitation process due to sustaining an injury from a motorcycle accident. I won’t deny that it sounds like a pretty cool way to regain strength, but what shocked me was the way that Logan questioned the reasoning behind it. She put words in his mouth, asking if the experiences with other rehabilitative regimens that Medvetz had been through following his accident were “like dying.” Medvetz was quick to agree. Sitting in a therapy room doing exercises, he explained, was akin to a life not worth living. Living a regular old life as a disabled man was a fate worse than death.

It breaks my heart to know this idea is so deeply ingrained in mainstream culture that a news anchor freely suggested it. Now, I cannot even begin to understand what it must be like to become disabled due to an injury, to be non-disabled one moment and disabled the next. Because I was born with my disability, I have not experienced this unimaginable grief and trauma. Moreover, I especially have nothing but immense respect for veterans injured in the line of duty. To me, though, the greatest show of respect for anyone, especially someone newly injured, is to stop playing a part in reinforcing stigma. How differently a wounded person might feel – and how differently we might feel about a wounded person – if the world was already welcoming of bodily diversity, rather than viewing it as something shameful, a deficit to fight against.

And yet, it is all too often the responsibility of the person in the stigmatized role to prove to the world that their stigma is misguided. The same logic tends to apply to all minorities and oppressed groups. For instance, women are told it’s their job to “lean in” so they’ll be successful in the male-dominated world of business. People of color are treated as guilty until proven innocent when police are suspicious of their behaviors. Why must our stories be forced into a narrative mold of overcoming adversity and stigma, when in fact it is people harboring adverse and stigmatizing beliefs that should be overcoming them?

Even though the 60 Minutes story clearly (and rightly) celebrated the perseverance of the veterans involved in The Heroes Project, the implications of the reporting were disappointing. The veterans’ accomplishments were illustrated as proving their abilities and their worth to society rather than to themselves, when in fact it seemed to me that the participants were in it not to prove anything to other people, but for their own personal empowerment. When will the media stop depicting disabled people as heroes for proving that disability in and of itself is NOT a fate worse than death?

Participants in The Heroes Project are no less worthy as human beings at the bottom of the mountain than they are when they reach the top. I was no less worthy as a human being at the top of the mountain when I went rappelling than I was when I reached the bottom. It shouldn’t take a mountain for you to know you are always, always, enough.

Emily Ladau is a writer and disability rights activist whose passion is to harness the powers of language and social media as tools for people to become informed and engaged social justice advocates. She maintains a blog, Words I Wheel By, as a platform to address discrimination and to encourage people to understand the experience of having a disability in more positive, accepting, and supportive ways.