A review by xrvnge
The View from Down Here: Life As a Young Disabled Woman by Lucy Webster

informative inspiring medium-paced

4.5

Body positivity was just starting to make a dent in the model-heavy early noughties culture, but every diktat to 'love yourself' came with a plea to focus on what your body did for you, not what it looked like. Naturally, this did little good. I thought - or had been made to think - that my body was useless, so basing my self-worth on its physical capabilities was sometimes actively bad for my conception of myself. […] These supposed ideals only bolstered my own deeply unhealthy tendency to deny my body attention and strip it of importance. 

In my head, there was an alternative Lucy, floating just on the edge of existence, who wasn't disabled - who at times didn't have a body at all. My all-consuming goal, back then, was to be as much like her as possible. This tendency to imagine a non-disabled alter ego wasn't helped by the fact that everyone else around me was in on the act. The most familiar refrain of my teenagehood was […] 'You can do anything you put your mind to.' When I protested that I had in fact put my mind to a great many things - walking, feeding myself, painting my nails - with no hint of success, people subtly changed tack, pivoting to a new argument that went something like this: 'It doesn't matter that you can't get yourself dressed, because you're smart!' […] Unfortunately, my already slightly neurotic brain interpreted this mantra as: it doesn't matter that you can't get yourself dressed, as long as you're smart. It should come as no surprise that I became quite the perfectionist.

Lucy Webster has brilliantly articulated how it is to exist as a white disabled woman in a systematically ableist and still-misogynistic western society. Being disabled since childhood myself, I deeply resonated with many of the experiences and emotions detailed throughout the book. This is not only a simple memoir however, as it discusses the (unfortunately) inherently political nature of being disabled, along with the many limitations of 2000’s feminism that has excluded disabled girls. In no way is this an academic political piece, and it never pretends to be. Regardless, I feel as though I’ve learnt almost intimately what it’s like to grow up with PAs, in a wheelchair, and visibly disabled within a society with extreme expectations of female perfection. 

The two quotes I shared are ones that will stick with me, as they perfectly describe my own feelings regarding my disabled body. I’ve also had a non-disabled version of myself and my body in my head. And when I’m not physically capable of living up to that non-disabled version of myself, I almost feel deeply betrayed by my body. As Webster puts plainly,

It is incredibly difficult to like a body that hurts.