On Disability Pride

From theory to lived experience: claiming disability pride

In honor of July as Disability Pride Month, I’m sharing a piece centered on disability pride. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an academic article about how affective science (the study of emotion) could be strengthened by integrating diversity science, specifically disability studies. As part of that work, I was writing about disability pride as a meaningful emotional experience and identity, one that’s often misunderstood or completely overlooked outside of the disability community.

And then it hit me: I was writing about disability pride intellectually, without having really reflected, at least not in writing, on my own lived experience of it. In the middle of Disability Pride Month, no less.

So, here it goes.

During my first few years of being disabled, I had the privilege, and the burden, of mostly concealing it. I wasn’t using a cane yet. I could fake eye contact. I was often told “I didn’t even know you’re disabled!” as a compliment. Passing meant I avoided some exclusion, but it also meant feeling like I was living a lie. I could go to parties or conferences without standing out as visibly disabled. I was mistaken for being illiterate or developmentally disabled (though the slur “retarded” was used). When I asked for help, strangers sometimes accused me of faking it.

Those early years held a strange duality: growing independence in college, and growing dependence. I couldn’t drive. I needed increasingly complex accommodations and assistive tech. But I also had deep friendships where I felt seen, supported, and valued, because of, not despite, the ways I needed help. I have so many memories of my beloved friend Lena reading my textbooks aloud while I lay with an eye-strain migraine and a cold rag on my face. When acquaintances thought I was aloof or rude, she clarified I just didn’t see them. She always picked visible landmarks for meetups, double-checked my makeup, provided verbal descriptions of what was happening in large gatherings, role-played tricky self-disclosure conversations with me, and announced cafeteria dessert favorites (if she hadn’t already brought me one - or three). She drove me, pointed out friends across the quad, and showed up in quiet, consistent ways that let me believe needing help didn’t make me weak. It made me human. It made us close.

After college, I moved across the country with no job and no community. It was a leap of faith, made harder by the logistics of being disabled in a new city. Eventually, I landed a job as a research coordinator at Stanford, working with youth and families affected by bipolar disorder. One day, my boss said, “I’m surprised you don’t study disability. Research is me-search.” I was offended. Bipolar disorder runs in my family, this work was personal. And I didn’t want to be boxed in by my disability. Plus I was still figuring out what disability meant to me. Pride felt out of reach.

Graduate school changed that. At UC Berkeley, home to the Disability Rights Movement, I found disability mentors, services, and community. I met Georgina Kleege, a blind disability studies scholar who shares my rare eye condition. We met on campus, her standing tall with her white cane. I didn’t even know that cane use was useful for someone with my vision. She offered practical wisdom, grounded confidence, and warm connection. She introduced me to other blind students. I began to understand: disability isn’t deficit, it’s difference. My needs weren’t special. They were specific. And they could be met.

Grad school was still brutal. I faced ableism in policy, in pedagogy, in attitudes. A supervisor told me I couldn’t be a clinical psychologist if I couldn’t administer neuropsych assessments independently. A stats professor “accommodated” me by giving handwritten equations that I couldn’t read no matter how much I enlarged them. But I also learned to self-advocate more effectively, got cane training, learned Braille (briefly), and found the blind community. I joined a group of blind runners. We swapped stories of crashing into signs, people, and poles, even with our guides, labeled vests, and other markers. I began writing, first blog posts, then peer-reviewed articles, then essays. I was deeply moved when friends and colleagues told me they understood ableism more clearly because of what I shared. And when my stories of struggle and problem-solving helped other students and trainees navigate ableism in academia, I began to feel pride and purpose in sharing what I once felt I had to hide.

The more I learned about disability justice, the more I began to identify proudly as disabled. Language became a source of power. “Disabled” wasn’t something to euphemize. It was something to say out loud. Movements like #SayTheWord and the frameworks from Sins Invalid gave me language for what I’d felt all along: that disability justice isn’t about fixing us. It’s about making space for us. It’s about honoring our wholeness, including our limits, our grief, our joy, and our uniqueness.

Sins Invalid’s principles including interdependence, collective access, prioritizing leadership of those most impacted offer me a political and emotional framework. Disability pride, I realized, is inseparable from justice. It’s not about inspiration porn. It’s about truth-telling. It’s about surviving in a world that wasn’t built for us, and proudly showing up anyway.

The pandemic deepened this clarity. Suddenly, access we’d begged for like remote work, flexible attendance, asynchronous options, became widespread. I completed dozens of internship interviews from my apartment, avoiding exhausting (and expensive) travel. Things previously “impossible” became doable overnight when nondisabled people needed them. It was infuriating and illuminating. My pride grew, not just as personal identity, but as political resistance.

Today, I’m a disabled clinical psychologist and researcher. My disability doesn’t weaken my work, it strengthens it. I talk daily with patients about pacing (with frequent shoutouts to Spoon Theory), community, and honoring authentic needs. I know what it means to need help, and I know how to offer it. A patient recently told me that after working with dozens of providers, it wasn’t until our sessions that she felt she had both an emotionally grounding and practically useful plan for navigating ableist environments. I often worked with patients to practice requesting accommodations without apology, role-playing how to hold their ground and problem-solve collaboratively. And when a patient says, “I just feel lazy,” I gently ask some version of, “Or are you exhausted from a world that makes you work twice as hard for half the access?” Watching the shifts in the room from being understood is powerful. Being able to show up more fully for disabled patients and meet them with both expertise and shared experience is one of the greatest honors of my work, and it brings me a sense of purpose in my disability pride.

And still: I live in a world riddled with ableism. I work in systems not made for me. I feel anger, grief, and frustration. But ironically, my pride fuels my anger, and my anger fuels my pride. I try not to turn it inward, toward shame. I try to direct it outward, toward systems that need to change.

What I’ve learned is this: Disability pride isn’t linear. Disability identity isn’t a final destination. Whether acquired or congenital, it’s a lifelong process. And once we think we’ve figured it out, our bodies change again. We cycle through denial, sadness, anger, adaptation, rage, trust, and maybe, pride. Not by being exceptional, but by accepting being human.

So here I am. Writing about disability pride beyond the academic construct, and instead as a way of belonging.

Questions I’m Grappling With

• What stories have you been told about disability, and which ones need rewriting?

• Why is disability pride less visible or celebrated than other identity-based pride movements like LGBTQIA+ pride?

• How do we hold space for pride while also naming the sadness, anger, and exhaustion that comes with living in a disabled body in an ableist world?

• What becomes possible in our relationships, our self-understanding, and our politics when we become proud of identities that have been marginalized?