I vote and last election I stuck my “I voted” sticker on my purse. It’s still there. I placed it there so that people would know that even though I am the way I am I still vote, my voice still matters, and that I’m a person with every bit of rights that anyone else has.
Earlier today I was thinking about my sticker on my purse and I had a sobering thought: Most people who meet me on the street, especially when my tics are bad, don’t see a sentient human being. Most people, I feel, when they do consider the possibility that I’m a human being consider me some kind of grown-up child. I’m sure that many people when they see my “I voted” sticker on my purse don’t look at me and think “that woman voted,” I feel they look at me and think “someone very nice in her life must have given her that sticker to make her feel good!”
It's a very frustrating feeling.
It's not just about the sticker. The sticker is just a part of the larger problem. It's part of how even though when I demonstrate my humanity, when who I truly am is expressed, my expressions of my personhood are so easily misconstrued.
I wear a sticker to proclaim my right to vote and people see a child with mommy's sticker. I wear my university's clothing, I don't know, maybe Goodwill. I hold my partner's hand in public and I have to worry about what people will think of her to be with someone "like me."
When it's not that, it's having my life defined as "an inspiration." The worst is when people learn a bit about me and learn about why I am the way I am they decide I'm okay after all: It's alright, I'm okay, I'm different, I'm not like Those People.
And that hurts.
Part of this post came from a comment I made at I'm Disabled and I Vote over at FWD/Forward.
Hello world!
1 year ago
3 comments:
But do they really think that or do you just think they do? Just a wonder...
I never get those stickers :( I vote absentee - they don't bother to send them to us.
It's more about the general attitude, I feel, than specifically the sticker.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but when you think about it a climate that would make someone like me feel this way tells you something about the culture which we live in, doesn't it?
I wear my "I Voted" sticker all day on election days; I'm proud of the fact that I vote, and of all the work I put into researching all the candidates to try and pick the best ones. (My whole family, not just me, uses the information I dig up.) So I take voting very seriously, and take a corresponding amount of pride in it.
I am not as visibly disabled as you, though, Untoward Lady, so me wearing a sticker all day doesn't send the same message of "Yes, disabled people vote" --- nor am I as likely to be assumed just to be wearing someone else's "I Voted" sticker.
(I usually go to vote *with* my mom, and we both come out wearing the stickers! That's probably the biggest signifier of disability in my life --- that, whenever I go someplace, I'm always with someone else, most often my mom, because I cannot drive.)
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