Blog Post

Ableism is not always loud. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it sounds exactly like love.

I can still hear it. My mother on the phone, voice carrying through the hallway, telling someone — a neighbor, a relative, a friend — “Yes, we have two children. One healthy, one sick.” Five words. My whole identity collapsed into one small, well-meaning, devastating word.

Sick.

I heard it hundreds of times growing up. And every single time, something small and painful moved through me — a tightening, a shrinking, a quiet sense that I was the problem in the sentence.

What is ableism?

Ableism is the belief, often unconscious, that people without disabilities are the default. That they are the standard. That everything else — everybody that moves differently, every mind that works differently, every life that looks different — is a lesser version of what a person is supposed to be.

It shows up in the big things: buildings without ramps, websites that screen readers cannot navigate, and employers who assume a wheelchair means someone cannot contribute. But it also shows up in the small things. In the words we choose without thinking. In the way we describe someone we love.

My parents were not cruel people. They were not careless people. They loved me fiercely, and I have never doubted that. They were simply using the vocabulary the world gave them — disability as sickness, difference as deficiency, a body like mine as something less than whole. That vocabulary shaped what they said. And what they said shaped me.

The impact of language does not depend on intention. Words land where they land.

What “sick” took from me

I was thirteen the first time I truly registered what that phrase did to me. Old enough to understand it. Young enough to be cut by it in a way that never fully healed.

Sick is a word for something temporary. Something you get over. Something that does not belong to you permanently. And so every time my parents called me their sick child, the message underneath was quiet but unmistakable: you are a version of a person who is not quite right yet. You are waiting to be fixed.

I tried not to let it bother me. I tried, and I still try, to release it. But some words attach themselves to you when you are young and still becoming — still deciding what you are worth, still learning how to take up space. They echo. They linger. Even when the people who said them would be heartbroken to know the damage they caused.

I am not sick. I am quadriplegic. These are not the same thing.

Being quadriplegic is my life. It is the body I inhabit, the lens through which I experience the world, the starting point for every challenge I have overcome and every joy I have found. It is not a tragedy waiting to be resolved. It is not a lesser version of something else. It is simply mine — and I have spent years learning to say that without apology.

The difference between sick and disabled

When we describe disability through the lens of sickness, lack, or tragedy, we send a message — to disabled people, and to everyone listening — that disability is something to be pitied. That people living with disabilities are defined by what they cannot do, rather than by who they are.

That message has consequences. It shapes how doctors talk to patients. How teachers see students. How employers evaluate candidates. How children understand themselves when they are thirteen, still figuring out who they are.

I know those consequences. I lived them. I spent years carrying a word that was not mine, a frame that did not fit, a story told about me that I had no hand in writing.

Disability is not synonymous with suffering. It is not the opposite of a good life. For me, it is the context in which I live — one that brings its own challenges, yes, but also its own depth, its own community, its own particular way of understanding what a body is capable of and what a life can hold. Using accurate language is not about being careful or politically correct. It is about telling the truth. And the truth, told honestly, is the only thing that ever restored anything in me.

Reclaiming the story

Growing older has meant slowly, carefully reclaiming the story I was handed. Learning to say: I am not sick. I am disabled. I am quadriplegic. And those words are not a diminishment — they are a description. They are mine.

I do not blame my parents for the language they used. They were doing what loving people do: trying to explain their child to a world that did not always know how to see her. I am forever grateful for the love underneath the imperfect words. But I carry a hope that the vocabulary will get better — that the next generation of parents will have a richer, more honest language to reach for. That the next thirteen-year-old who hears herself described will hear something closer to the truth of who she is.

Ableist language does not have to be loud to do damage. It can be gentle. Loving, even. And it can still reach inside a child and make her feel like a problem to be solved rather than a person to be known.

She is not sick. She is not less.

She is living a different kind of life — and that life is worth every single word.