Stop the stories about winning the Olympics or climbing a mountain

Please stop writing stories about how some person with a disability over-came all obstacles and conquered a tough goal.

They do not reflect the reality of every day life for most people with disabilities. We are just trying to survive in a mainly hostile world. We are adapting and doing our best.

Here are some examples from today and yesterday –

Intellectually-disabled athletes rejoin Paralympics

Paralympian Drags Himself to Plane After Airline Makes Him Check Wheelchair

Dance Offers Key To Mobility For Actor With Cerebral Palsy …

Paralympic curling champ Chris Daw, and vision-impaired curler …

There are many stories of people with disabilities who tried to be sports heroes with wheelchair basketball, cycling and even skiing. The usual outcome is over-extended muscles and or broken bones.

Someone once said: you could learn to ski. Of course I could but why would I risk a fall and break the one leg that works properly.

The real lives of people with disabilities is trying to manoeuvre through the mundane things like breakfast, lunch and dinner, bathing and showers, pain reduction, social isolation, work place accommodation and poverty. They have nothing to do with being a champion.

When those models of disability lifestyle are promoted in the press, real people with disabilities wonder why aren’t we doing that? Probably because we are just trying to get by most of the time. Probably because we are tired from the mundane parts of life.

Expect to accommodate

Normally intelligent people do not allow those with disabilities accommodation beyond holding a door open or handicap parking and even those are a fight sometimes.

We don’t expect pity. We need accommodation. We might be tired, too weak to accomplish something, emotionally frazzled by the last two hours of existence.

I’m still amazed at the wonderfully ignorant treatment I received at the hands of PEI’s media at the Press Gallery lynching. You explain to someone you can’t cope and they just ignore you.

Despite the detail I went into to clarify, a very nice person afterward said “I didn’t understand it was that difficult.” What part of the English language escaped him and 14 of his peers?

The real disability stories are sometimes mundane, sometimes harrowing. They usually involve being a hero by doing less and accepting the limitations of one’s situation.