Article
I am familiar with dynamic disability, even if the people who encounter me often are not.
Social misunderstandings are nothing new for those with dynamic disabilities. I recall one moment in particular, standing up from my wheelchair in a supermarket in Canada to reach something on a high shelf, and being on the receiving end of raised eyebrows and alarming murmurs of bewilderment that caused me to question if it wouldn’t be easier in future to ask someone for help I didn’t need, rather than stretch and use my legs for those few seconds. I didn’t bow to that pressure but could see why someone would. It was clear to me then that such a sight had lost none of its shock value since Spike stood up from his wheelchair on Buffy The Vampire Slayer in 1997.
The misguided notion, I suppose, is that only people with full paralysis, or similar, would need a wheelchair, and therefore everyone using a wheelchair must be ‘wheelchair bound’, as the blanket, out-date term implies. Seeing someone stand up from a wheelchair is therefore witnessing a miracle, or a fraud – something pop culture has repeatedly fed us. In Spike’s case, the real plot twist was that he went from needing a wheelchair after his injuries, to not needing one at all but faking it to fool his frenemy Angel, apparently with no real middle ground of recovery in between.
The term ‘dynamic disability’ was coined around 2019 by Brianne Benness, and captures the reality well for the millions of people with fluctuating symptoms and chronic conditions, whose bodies change enough from day to day, or hour to hour, to require mobility aids, non-negotiable periods of inactivity, or other interventions. Activity one moment might require a change in support the next. This should not be hard to understand, as bodies are not static. It has always struck me as odd that we can accept the need for pain killers to respond to a fluctuation in the body, a nap to respond to the reality of physical tiredness, and eyeglasses for some situations but not others, but popular culture and popular myth draws the line at a fluctuating need for a mobility aid, or the ability to engage in certain activities one day, but not the next.
As someone who is now gratefully in remission from CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome), I don’t need a mobility aid at the moment, but Nyx, my chair, sits in waiting for changes in the future, as does my cane, Wolfie.
We can all be disabled at any moment, and statistically speaking most people will be. About one in five people have a disability, and the fact that many of those disabilities are dynamic and not static, should be understood as normal. It’s not a miracle or a fraud when the body changes from one moment to the next. It is a natural part of life.