My parents’ logic is, as usual, difficult to argue with. A few days ago they came to visit, and we were talking about how I get so worked up about all these online influencers now purporting to be disabled. They pointed out that, given that such people don’t harm or effect me in any way, there is no point in getting so agitated. To a certain extent I can see what they mean – live and let live, and all that. After all, going on and on about such people just makes me seem spiteful and bitter.

And yet…And yet: no!

I think it’s fair to say that I had a pretty awesome childhood. It was stable, warm and loving. From around 1988, when I was five, until 2001, I was taken every weekday fourteen miles across Cheshire to a special school on the far side of Winsford. It was a small, quiet special school with 120 or so pupils, all with their own profound disabilities. Pupils’ ages ranged from between two to eighteen, and the school catered for a vast array of young people: all had physical disabilities, often quite profound, but many also had learning difficulties.

I was in a class of eight or so other students with just physical disabilities. Although students came in and out of my class for various reasons over the years, for the most part I grew up with them. We went through infancy and adolescence together, and became almost like siblings. Everyone had their own problems, yet somehow our disabilities never seemed to be an issue. There was Rich with Spina Bifida, who I remember crawling across the floor of the nursery, before he started using a wheelchair, dragging his paralysed legs behind him. Lee who had Muscular Dystrophy, who I remember having to go every morning to the physio department to spend an hour or so with his legs in strange inflatable stockings. Liam, who I think had SB too, and was passionate about Manchester United.

One day I will have to tell this story in full before it is forgotten completely; but for now let it be sufficient for me to just say this: I feel immensely proud and privileged to have known all my classmates and to have grown up with them. There are many criticisms of special schools and the segregated education system, but the fact remains that it is only due to the fact I went to such a school that I came know such people. They shaped who I am to the same degree – if not even more – than going to university did. Those guys had a fortitude and resilience which I have found nowhere else, save perhaps for in Lyn. Every day our class was full of laughter and banter (usually, I must admit, at my expense). They taught me to hold my head high: that even though your body might fail you and the horizon might look ominous, that is no reason not to walk on through the darkness with hope and happiness.

That, far more than anything else, is what going to such a school taught me. All my classmates were profoundly disabled and most used powerchairs, but we rarely if ever spoke about our disabilities. It simply was not an issue. There was no moaning or complaining; they just got on with their life. Perhaps those guys were less interested in academia than other students their age, but given most of their prognoses I think that is understandable. They knew what was to come, and we even lost three classmates over the years; yet self pity was unheard of. We just saw ourselves as regular children or teenagers.

Only in such places can you learn such lessons. Only when you grow up going to a special school do you get to meet such unique, courageous young people. They taught me what disability means, while not being in any way defined by their conditions. There were a vast array of students at school, all of them with highly complex, debilitating disabilities, but they all just saw their selves as kids.

I left school over twenty years ago, and over the last two decades most of my old classmates have passed away one by one. Of the eight of us, just three are left. That is a heart-wrenching, bleak thought; but just as I think my classmates knew what was to come and didn’t let it impede them, I must not now let such darkness impede me. Every new morning brings the potential for something incredible. Yet, both all around me in this great metropolis and online, I now come across people doing precisely the opposite. People now seem to be using their disabilities as their identities in a way which would have seemed absurd to my classmates. They seem to boast about being disabled, rather than seeing it as just something to put up with, just as your mates put up with theirs.

More to the point, apparently only having started to identify as disabled later in life (and seemingly on ever more tenuous grounds), the vast majority of such people will have never set foot in a special school: They will never have gone to a hydrotherapy session, chatted to their mates while they were being tugged and stretched in physio, or watched as two of their classmates cover their ears and burst into tears at being told a fire alarm practice was about to happen, the implant in their ears causing them so much agony. Such places would seem utterly alien, even repugnant, to these online influencers, yet they speak like experts informing the internet of what life is like for disabled people. Tell me: how can I let this stand? How can I let this world be intruded upon and usurped by people who know nothing of it? People who have never met guys like Rich, Lee, Liam or Lyn, and would probably want nothing to do with them if they did. People who trample on my friends’ fortitude and resilience, and turn disability into a gimmick with which to attract internet hits. I simply cannot let this be.

I realise I keep returning to this issue, and it’s probably irritating people. I should just let other people live their lives just as I live mine. Yet I can’t forget the guys I met back at school, or ignore how the people I now come across seem to almost mock them in their attention-seeking, pity-seeking outbursts. If that makes me come across as bitter and spiteful, so be it – surely that is a natural reaction to an increasingly bitter and spiteful world.