There are pivotal moments in your life that change your path. Sometimes we know we’re experiencing them in the moment. Other times we look back on them and realise they led to us changing direction or just changing full stop.
For me, as I imagine for you, some of them have been very personal and individual moments. Messages I received, opportunities I had, difficult experiences too that opened certain doors or closed other ones. And then there are more expansive moments that create societal shifts or change societal narratives. The Me Too movement in 2006 which led to me, and many others, questioning what we had previously thought of as ‘acceptable’ behaviour towards women. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 which brought starkly to light systemic racism and saw a shift towards anti-racism (a painfully slow and often stalled shift). A constellation of different events - learning about social constructionism during my undergraduate degree, finding out about the social disability model and then more recently discovering the neuroaffirming paradigm - which all helped me to better understand the ways that we maintain disability discrimination.
For me some of the most painful but also wonderful parts of those shifts was what they led me to realise about my own internalised narratives. I realised how much I had internalised misogyny, racism and ableism. And how much my actions had upheld inequality. Learning more, opening new doors, helped me to see, understand and challenge my own prejudices. And once you start to make these shifts, and understand your part in them, it becomes so much easier to make other shifts. To see the social construction of… well, everything. And to question: who gets to decide that this is how we do things? And why do they get to decide?
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