Disability Unfiltered: Strangers Hate This One Weird Trick

Welcome to my series, Disability Unfiltered, where I’ll be highlighting other disabled voices on Substack.

My goal for this series is to publish guest posts from others with disabilities to build community, raise awareness about what it’s truly like to live with various disabilities, and increase authentic disability representation across Substack.

I hope you’ll join me in highlighting the love, loss, pain, fear, beauty, strength, and perseverance of the disabled experience.

“Strangers Hate This One Weird Trick” by Brad

The benefits and awkwardness of being an ambulatory wheelchair user

So, a guy yelled at me in a Costco.

I was on one of those electric carts, parked under the thing I needed, which was of course on the top shelf, because it’s always on the top shelf. I stood up, grabbed it, sat back down. That’s it. That’s the whole crime. Somewhere behind me a grown man just... lost it. How dare I use a cart I didn’t need, etc etc. All the usual stuff. He was pretty cranky about it. I ended up just scooting away.

Okay, context. I’ve got cerebral palsy, mostly affecting my legs and lower back. Chair some days, cane others. The legs DO work, they just bill by the minute: ten seconds of standing is pocket change, a lap of the grocery store is more than the whole day’s budget. The chair is how I afford the full trip.

Being able to stand at all is a cheat code. A single step into a shop is a locked door for a full-time chair user. Me? I stand up, lift the chair over, sit back down, keep rolling. Somebody’s left something blocking the one accessible route? Pick the chair up, walk around it, problem solved. When a brake jams I get out and crouch beside my own wheelchair to fix it. A lot of people in chairs can’t do any of that, and I think about it pretty much every time it saves my ass. I got dealt a good hand, if we’re grading on a curve at least.

The problem is the... optics. In most people’s heads, you can walk or you can’t, and I’m... neither? Both? There’s no checkbox “if it’s longer than a couple minutes it’s going to turn into a whole thing.” When I stand up, nobody’s thinking “huh, legs must work in bursts.” They’re thinking they caught me. Reach for the cereal, looks. Get up to move the thing blocking the aisle and sit back down to go about my business, looks, and maybe some muttering about laziness or whatever else. The Costco guy was just the loud version.

Oh, and the help thing. Someone offers to help me grab something, I say no thanks, I stand up and get it myself... and now they’re mad at me. Not confused. Mad. Like I picked their pocket. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what went missing there. The offer was never really addressed to me, ya know? There was a little movie already playing, the one where they help the wheelchair guy, and I cancelled it mid-scene. Turns out declining help is ruder than needing it, and standing up afterwards is often worse.

So I get both. The perks AND the glares. I’m luckier than a lot of people in chairs, I know that, and I still spend a weird chunk of my life getting audited by strangers to make sure I’m disabled enough to do whatever it was I was doing that definitely didn’t affect them either way. The feelings involved are annoyingly ambiguous and mixed together.

Full-timers have a harder ride than me, no contest, and plenty of people walking laps around me are hauling things I can’t see. The middle ground is just its own weird concept, and a lot of people don’t seem to quite believe it exists for some reason.

It’s Disability Pride Month, and for a body like mine, pride mostly means I quit performing. I’m not going to act extra disabled so strangers can file me under the picture they’ve already got, and I’m not going to act basically-fine so everybody can relax. The body does what it does, and old dudes at Costco get to be cranky in my direction now and then. Life goes on.

So happy disability pride month. Watch your toes... wouldn’t want to run them over on my way to get a 5 lbs box of cinnamon toast crunch from a nice high shelf.

About the Author

Brad (aka @rollswithitruns) runs The Spice Rack, a line of kink education guides built for the bodies and brains most kink advice pretends don’t exist. He’s autistic, with cerebral palsy, and is fueled by a frankly irresponsible amount of caffeine and spite.

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