Dear whoever has the pleasure of reading this right now: forgive me for I have sinned; it has been almost two months since my last blog post. When I started college, I envisioned having more time to regale you all with trivial tales of my little life but being ever self-pushy and, well…me, that hasn’t happened. However I need to get this off my chest, otherwise I may implode.

I feel like I am living in a nightmare where everyone else is asleep but I am wide awake. I am slowly suffocating and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. Being in college for the last few months has confirmed to me that I live within a culture that constructs disability as a problem, that encourages us to blame ourselves for our shortcomings to deflect from the fact that we are oppressed and becoming increasingly voiceless.

Do you think I’ve lost the plot? I think so too.

For college, I decided to do my research essay on Independent Living in Ireland. May I say I wish I’d done it on something else, something I couldn’t give a crap about, because the more I read, the angrier I become. Sometimes I wonder would life be much easier if I didn’t know anything about the reality of Independent Living in Ireland. I wish I could shrug my shoulders, say ‘ah well, that’s just the way it is’.

But I can’t, so here I am.

Reader, I want you to think of your life as it is right now. Maybe you’re a student who studies hard during the week and parties harder at weekends. Perhaps you have the career you always dreamed of, one that brings you all over the world. You could be the proud parent of eight beautiful kids, secretly loving the chaos. Or maybe you’re a bit of a Lothario, with a different partner on your arm every ten minutes. It takes all sorts to  make this world. People with different views, dreams, outlooks, opinions. Everyone is different; that’s what makes us so interesting.

Now, imagine you only had control over your  life for forty-five minutes a day. Yup, forty-five minutes. Imagine you were the CEO of a multi-million euro company. How would you fly around the world to all your important meetings? Imagine you were a fun-loving, party-animal college student who had to go to bed at eight o’clock in the evening and get up at eight o’clock,  no exceptions.  Imagine being fully corpus mentis and expected to put up with an ‘expert’ who doesn’t know anything about you or your life making major decisions about how often you go to the toilet, how often you shower, what you can eat for your dinner.

Welcome to being disabled and needing assistance in 2019, and it’s like a parallel universe. Often it’s like looking at the world from inside a glass bubble, but not quite being able to reach it. It can get lonely in there, and suffocating. And no-one dares break that glass bubble in case someone gets hurt. It’s a world of risk assessments, of the professionals in the white coats, trying in vain to convince people that they truly believe in empowerment and equality. Oh, you can be empowered, so long as these experts are given the power to empower you. They will decide how much assistance you need based on some ticked boxes on a long form. If you have pride, this exercise will be particularly painful. Nobody likes to admit that they can’t do things by themselves. Isn’t the measure of a man/woman the ability to do things by himself/herself?

It’s best to be as compliant and agreeable as possible. No-one likes a troublemaker. And it’s not as though you making a stink is going to make any difference. Everyone knows what happened when Winston Smith from 1984 questioned the system. The system broke him, and in the end he was just grateful that Big Brother had saved his life, even though it was this system that made his life unbearable in the first place.

I fear I’m not making this point very well – Independent Living and freedom of choice is not a disability issue. It is a human rights issue, and one that effects every single one of us. How, you might ask. I don’t believe that ‘non-disabled’ people should support the disability movement just in case they become disabled one day, though I respect people who do have this mindset. I believe that if you don’t believe that the lives of disabled people are worth investing in, if you don’t quite think that every one of us, regardless of impairment, has something to offer, then you are perpetuating an idea of “them” and “us”.

I have postponed penning this blog for about a month now. I didn’t want to upset anyone. I don’t want to appear ungrateful for what I have. Then, this evening, I wondered how many people feel the same way I do, and are also afraid to say anything? How many of you out there are tired of fighting the system? How many of you have become apathetic because it’s really only a myth that the little people can win?

Apologies to those with screenreaders for the shouting here, but –  THESE ARE OUR LIVES.

We only get one life. Are we going to spend the rest of ours being told what to do, waiting to see who arrives to get us up out of bed? We don’t want to be taken care of, we want to be empowered, enabled! We are only going to live once so let’s fight for the things that really matter. Going for that cuppa and getting the cream bun that’s bad for us. Going clubbing and getting so roaring drunk that you end up with your head in the toilet at the end of the night. Taking that job in Dublin that you’ve always wanted. And above all, having the control and the assistance needed, as decided by you, to do those things that all of us should be taking for granted.

Until this is a reality, I don’t think we can afford to be complacent. After all, everyone needs a little help sometimes.

Shameless plug: Independent Living Movement Ireland are running a #PASNow Campaign, which calls for the definition and legislation of Personal Assistance. Achieving this would help bring Ireland in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. If you are interested, please visit http://www.ilmi.ie.