Today I would like to examine the subject of identity, and how it might relate to disability. There are folk out there who describe it as complex, but when you actually think about it, it is remarkably simple. A very wise woman recently told me that ‘it’s not what you are, it’s who you are’. That is to say, you can be given any label under the sun, but what matters are your actions and personality. I can be described as a person with quite severe cerebral palsy; a man; a cross dresser; a person with brown hair; whatever. These are just labels – constructions in the Lacanian symbolic – what matters is that I am me.

This is what I base my identity on. To have my disability at the core of my being would be to see myself as different from everyone else, like an adolescent Goth moaning ‘nobody knows the pain I feel’ as he listens to depressing music. We are who we are: okay, I happen to use a lightwriter to speak and a chair to get around, but I can communicate with anyone and go anywhere, so it does not matter. I am, quite simply, a person, and label myself as such. To define myself on the basis of my disability would be to set up divisions which need not be there – if I were to define myself as ‘white’, for example, I would automatically create a division between myself and people with different skin colour, implying separateness. Just as it should not matter what skin tone you have, or your gender, why does it matter that I have cp? To base the core of one’s identity on the fact that one may belong to a particular social or ethnic group to my mind betrays a particular kind of parochial attitude; the same surely applies to one’s disability. What matters is that we all strive to be the best person we can be.

This is not to say that I want everyone to act the same way, but the very opposite. Why should we restrict ourselves to one pre-set social group? Different groups produce different things, and have different ways to look at things. I don’t want to destroy that, or for everyone to be the same, but to mix, to try other things. Simply to define myself as one thing – a person with c.p – would imply that I intend to follow a pre-determined path, to act in certain ways. This is not my aim. I will always have cp, just as I will always be white, but at the core such things are not who I am. My father, for example, endowed me with a particular liking for cricket and real ale: I will probably always like them, but this is not to say I cannot also love football and larger, or sumo and sake. In the years to come, all being well, you will find my tyre tracks from Tokyo to los Angeles. The fact that I have cerebral palsy is irrelevant to this.