Ableism - I hate you

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Gen Memory, And bones/worn, 2020-2021, oil and oil stick on cradled panel, 50.7 x 40.4 x 1.9cm, hand-stained timber frame, from the Paperskin series. Private collection

Dear Ableism,

I hate you.

You have never understood me.

You look at my name and my face and my teeth and my hair and you declare me to be normal.

But I didn’t choose my name.

And I didn’t choose my hair.

My parents scraped every cent they had to get me braces and headgear and braces and a retainer so that my considerable underbite would not lead to my teeth collapsing in, eventually rendering me unable to speak or to eat.

And my face, though ‘white’, has been puffy and distended for 15 years. 

Look more closely.

My body is overweight from the effects of medication and my abdomen is permanently distended from disease. 

My gait is awkward and clunky. 

Those two cushions in that bag on my shoulder aren’t there for decoration, no – they’re there to ease the chronic pain I’ve lived with since I was 15. 

Look more closely.

It has taken the coining and popularising of your name and my entire lifetime to realise that you have been hurting me since I was a child.

The reason why I couldn’t throw and catch until I was 21 is because I had an undiagnosed processing disorder. 

I am mentally disabled. 

Look more closely.

The reason why my legs and spine were uncommonly stiff and my knees cracked at ballet and gym, making my classmates laugh, is because I had undiagnosed juvenile arthritis. 

I am physically disabled.

Look more closely.

Quite frankly, Ableism, you are tormenting me.

You expect me to take the stairs when the lift is out of order.

I can’t.

You put heavy glass doors just about everywhere that I can’t open because my arms are weak and damaged, like at my doctor’s and my occupational therapist’s.

Your cruelty is perplexing and the irony strong.

You offer tantilising experiences that I can never enjoy because I live alone and have no one to care for me – holidays away, festivals, a trip to the cinema.

These same tantilising experiences present danger in the form of contamination because I am immunosuppressed.  That constant hand-sanitising isn’t OCD – it’s preserving life and keeping me out of hospital.

And don’t you dare hurl that most obnoxious of insults in my direction – ‘privileged’. 

You can take your nonsensical, unproveable privilege binary and put it where the sun don’t shine. 

Why don’t you go away and pick on some other socially isolated, disabled, chronically ill abuse survivor?

Look more closely.

Look more closely.

Look more closely.

Gen Memory

August 2025