To be fair at the moment I have a bit of a runny nose, probably brought on by the onset of spring and nothing to worry about. Apart from that, however, I do not nor have I ever seen myself as sick or ill. I have a congenital physical disability, but I have known for a long time that that is no reason to feel sorry for myself. In fact I am probably one of the luckiest, healthiest people around.

I find self pity utterly repugnant. I think I have written here before that one of the reasons I admired people like Lyn so much was that they never complained about their Disabilities, despite the severity of their conditions. Recently online though, I have been coming across more and more videos by people styling themselves as “sick” or “chronically ill”. The content they post seems based wholly upon this status, and they frame their entire online identities around being unwell. While I am aware that not all medical conditions are obvious, in their videos they appear perfectly well, and usually upload every detail or two. What I find most provocative though, is that, while they appear to be able bodied, they also refer to themselves as disabled, even occasionally calling themselves cripples.

I’m sorry but that to me is intolerable. Of course I have used the word cripple in the title of my blog for over twenty years; but as a survivor of the special school system among other things, I think I have a right to be part of the reclamation of such language. To hear such online fakers try to claim it as their own, when they aren’t the ones who have had such words used against them as terms of abuse, feels like such grotesque sociocultural usurpation and intrusion that it physically hurts. More to the point, the vlogs they post are little more than streams of self pity about how woeful their lives are, as well as how difficult it is to convince medical professionals that they are indeed ill. Again, while I may jokingly call myself a cripple, I know how important it is not to just blog about having a disability, but to touch on other topics ranging from politics to film to what I had for breakfast, if just to let readers know that I am as rounded a person as anyone else. My disability does not define who I am, nor do I use it as the basis for endless blog entries about how miserable my life is and how everyone should feel sorry for me.

I know I keep coming back to this issue, but it really troubles me: people are claiming to be ill or disabled when there is nothing wrong with them. From the bit of online research I have done, the number of people claiming to have some sort of medical condition has shot up markedly over the last five years, particularly since the pandemic. That alone I wouldn’t mind, but the fact that they are now so resonant online, claiming our language as their own and framing themselves almost as champions of disability rights, really gets to me. They haven’t been what people like me, Lyn or my school friends went through: they weren’t shoved away into special schools, don’t get treated like five year olds or get mocked by children in the streets. As far as I can tell, they have lived pretty normal, able-bodied lives. Many such people admit to having partners, children and – until quite recently – jobs. Thus to hear them speak with such nauseating self pity about how downtrodden and oppressed they are, while flashing the boxes of pills they claim they need to take on screen, really does boil my blood. It effectively reduces an integral part of who I am down to an online trend; it uses disability as pity porn to attract online viewers. I know many people would advise me to just put up with it; but this trend is rising so sharply and becoming so obscene that it just makes me want to slap these lachrymose, attention seeking imbeciles.