I wonder what it would be like to get all (or even most) of your words right

I realised tonight while preparing notes for Monday’s Legislative Council inquiry hearing that I have been, for months, calling it a Senate inquiry. Fark.

In the Riff, 10 minutes before my biopsy on Thursday, working - to distract myself.

My brain does things like this regularly, often in public, and it drives me up the wall. I still have a substantial amount of internalised ableism when it comes to my learning Disabilities. I cringe - physically cringe - when I realise I have made a mistake in my wording like this.

I feel like crying and my face goes hot when I make mistakes in public; mistakes of understanding, comprehension, wording and attention. Just slow down and prepare more carefully is the advice I’ve been given by well-meaning people my whole life.

This advice works for Neurotypical people. It does not work for many, many Neurodivergent people.

Lapses in attention, differences in one’s ability to comprehend and interpret, express and respond are usually involuntary: and can loom so significantly in the life of so many Neurodivergent people - the shame around these things, the discrimination, the stigma, the terror of being laughed at in private, or in public, by others - that they stop participating.

I do not.

I realised maybe about a year ago that if I planned to make any kind of difference in the world as an advocate, I needed to be prepared to be laughed at. Mocked. Disliked. Abused. Cast out.

I knew this would happen because it has happened since I was a tiny child. My differences have always attracted at the very least, derision, and at the most - institutionalisation, violence, threats to my care of my child.

I decided I would do it anyway, regardless of this.

I understand I will always make mistakes aloud, because I am Disabled. In taking up space anyway - with all of my fumbles going along with me for the ride - I am choosing to carve a path for my peers who also make frequent mistakes like this…

…and yet are competent, worthy leaders with a lot to contribute.

Until and unless our politics in Australia is ready for brains that wander and wax and wane, we will not have justice. Until we have a readiness to approach all people with equity; to see the dyslexic and the Autistic and the intellectually Disabled person as our equal, and not our tolerated side-kick or charity case, we will not have justice.

It isn’t nice that Disabled people show up and ‘have their say’. We are showing up to take back power. We are not here to be given a slice of your time; you the arbiter of the system. We are here to re-design the system so it is fit for Disabled purpose.

So even though I have called this very critical engagement opportunity on behalf of my community the entirely wrong thing, for months, I have decided it is unimportant that I have: and I am breathing through the shame I was taught to feel.

The names of groups of decision-makers, after all, are far less important than the decisions they make. This is what it comes down to, isn’t it?

The content of our characters; and the wisdom of our principles.

For this reason, I will forever prefer to spend my time with the powerless in my community who treat each other with respect and mutual dignity, than the powerful who get all their words right: but have nothing of substance to offer from their hearts.

I told a colleague about this bungle of wording. “The thing that bothers me is not that I got the word wrong,” I said, “But that those close to decisions watching my advocacy, our advocacy, would look at this and smile to themselves - deciding that I am inferior to them. That they are better than me.”

“That makes sense. They are not, also.”

I know they are not. But do they understand this? I don’t think so. The greatest problem we have in Australia is that those close to decisions see themselves as fundamentally different, separate and better than Disabled people. This is the essence of segregation; and it is counter to the progress of rights.

Rights are about equity.

I would rather be a person who gets my words wrong, to be frank. Perhaps it is only those of us who understand what it is to be seen as less, who have the tools needed to reform a world in which that is allowed to happen routinely. Perhaps it is true now, as it always has been, that it is those outside and below, who must rise until we those on top and inside power, abdicate and/or share.

Viva la revolucion, my friends. Viva.