By Max Huibregtse
I didn’t realize I was disabled until about six years after my diagnosis. I knew, of course, that I was ill — that I had a chronic condition, that I had had more doctor’s appointments in the last half decade than most of my peers had had in their entire 18 years. Unlike many disabled young adults, I had a diagnosis — type 1 diabetes — and an explanation for what was happening to my body. I had medications that made me feel better and medical equipment that allowed me to live a more or less ‘normal’ life, to walk into a college classroom where no one except my roommate knew I was diabetic.
On one such normal day, I participated in an activity designed by my classmates. It didn’t strike me as unusual: Signs were posted around the room denoting different markers of identity — race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Someone would read out a statement, and we would all migrate to the sign that we felt best described that statement for us. The last statement was something like, “This is the aspect of my identity I think about all the time.” I sat alone in the middle of the room; I didn’t have an answer. It wasn’t until we were leaving the classroom that I realized that disability wasn’t even on the wall.
The CDC defines a disability as a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s ability to participate in everyday life in a “normal” way. As a diabetic, I lack many of the visual signifiers of disability that my classmates would have been expecting. I don’t use a walker or a wheelchair; I don’t wear dark glasses and navigate the world with a cane though, of course, my visually impaired friends don’t do that either). In the legal world of black and white, diabetes is definitionally a disability, as spelled out in the protections of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. I cannot be fired if I have to, say, leave a meeting to manage a falling blood sugar, and if I eventually develop nerve damage, as many diabetics do, my employers will have to accommodate my limited mobility.
In the cultural world of the everyday, though, it isn’t quite that simple. To many casual observers, if I don’t look disabled, I must be exaggerating, or faking, or just not trying hard enough — assumptions that many people with chronic (i.e. long-term) conditions struggle to overcome in claiming their status as disabled.
