The more astute of you have probably spotted a small hypocrisy on my part. While I have attacked what I see as the increasingly insular behaviour of the disabled community on account that it might be shooting itself in the foot, I still partake in my own freakism by referring myself as a cripple. By using this word, I automatically allude to an idea of normal which I exist outside of. Yet in recent blogs I have shown how I believe that there is no ‘normal’, and therefore I am ‘normal’. Why, then, do I still to myself as a cripple? This occurred to me as I signed myself ‘the cripple’ in a message to a friend last night.

I like doing so. I guess I like the feeling that I am slightly different to the rest of society – a freak, as it were. I want to celebrate the power of using a word reclaimed from a term of abuse. Yet society has no normal, thus I am not a freak. How do I square the two. It goes back to what I wrote here: ” I am supposed to expect people to accept my needs and differences, but shouldn’t have to explain what those differences are to people; I shouldn’t be expected to have to conform to an essentially arbitrary status quo, yet I hate people staring at me for being ‘different’. Nor should I have to explain my views on the politics of the status quo to people. I belong to a community, a subculture, yet I am no different than anyone else.” I am simultaneously a freak and normal, and I like being both equally. Inasmuch as I am as free as anyone else, liberated under the social model, I am ‘not disabled’, yet without cerebral palsy I would not be me. The truth is, I cant get my head round it.