The word I never claimed

My daughter said it in passing, the way revelations sometimes arrive.

We were talking about neurodivergence, about the accumulating weight of labels, and she just said — well, you are disabled.

I stopped.

I had never thought of it that way.

Not once. In forty years of getting on with it.

I've had ME. AuDHD. Mental health fractures. Many that have floored me and would someone else without the particular stubbornness I seem to have been born with. I've been refused PIP because I can do enough physically — apparently the invisible kind doesn't count in the same way. I've been a solo parent, an only child, a caregiver, self-employed since my 20's, financially pressured into functioning when functioning wasn't really available.

And somewhere in all of that — I just never claimed the word.

Disability, in my mind, looked like something else. Something more visible. More accepted. The kind that comes with acknowledgment, with support, with people noticing.

Mine didn't look like that. So I didn't look like that.

I also wouldn't want to take away from someone else's need, or insert myself as some kind of problem.

But here's what I've been sitting with since she said it:

The fact that I've always had to fight through — that no one helped, that I've had to be independent by necessity rather than choice, that the down weeks and months came and went and I pushed back through them mostly because there was no alternative — that isn't evidence that I'm not disabled.

That's just what disability looks like when you're on your own with it.

I'm still not entirely comfortable with the word. Forty years of not using it doesn't dissolve overnight.

But I'm thinking about it differently now.

And I think that's worth writing about.

Ax