No, Disabled People Do Not Exist To Inspire You

Yes, it is offensive to write disabled characters to act as inspiration to others. or how to write disabled characters accurately

Warning: rage incoming.

Photo by David Knudsen on Unsplash

Over on Reddit, a thread has popped up , inspired by tweets circulating on Twitter/X.

I’m not sure what happened to get it all started, several such topics are showing up everywhere this morning — tiktok, youtube, etc -, but near as I can tell, it started because some politician somewhere did or said some hateful thing about disabled people, leading to Twitter arguments about how inspiring disabled people are… what started the conversations isn’t important for this discussion.

Now… while at first these people seem to be trying to defend disabled people… they really are not paying attention to how utterly condescending they are when they say things like:

“The world needs disabled people to inspire us to endure the hardships of life”.

The Reddit thread started as an offshoot of the Twitter thread, and continued the “I’m not disabled for your entertainment” conversation being made by wheelchair users who were fed up with both abusers and advocates.

yep, this sort of bs is WHY I (a novelist) gave my villian (Quaraun the Insane) all the same disabilities and mobility aids I have and use.

In my earlier stories he was just a minor character, rarely mentioned, and not fully fleshed out.

From 1978 to 2014 the series was called “The Twighlight Manor Series”, and Quaraun was still known only as “The Necromancer Who Built The Twighlight Manor” with the main characters Etiole, EelKat, Roderic, and Gremlin avoiding talking about him. The name Quaraun and the title The Pink Necromancer book appeared for the first time in 2014 with the release of Night of The Screaming Unicorn, the first book to use the new series title “The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane”.

So, me the author pre-Quaraun era was pre-wheelchair era… my son being murdered, the backhoe driving over my house, and me becoming wheelchair bound, is the real life events that inspired my retiring all the original main characters, and renaming the series, and refocusing the series to focus on the rarely mention “necromancer who built the Twighlight Manor” whom had never made an on page apperance prior to 2014.

but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

BUT… I have low functioning non-verbal autism, have rheumatism since age 4, had MS since age 16, was paralyzed from age 37 onward, regained limited use of 2 fingers at age 42, regained limited use of my legs at age 47, am currently wheelchair bound 80% of the day, but can walk enough to talk my dog around the block twice a day by standing behind my wheelchair and pushing it like a rollator, and I can walk about 15 to 20 feet with a cane… so quite disabled by a LOT…

…here’s the issue… having already published over a dozen books before becoming wheelchair bound, I had quite a few fans who had met me in person at book signings… but then, for a few years I just “vanished” and as none of my family updated my social media to tell anyone I was suddenly quadriplegic, none of my fans knew I was paralyzed with a broken spine for several years and that’s why I stopped publishing books and stopped doing book signings.

…so… when I suddenly returned to publishing and doing book signings, quite a few fans whom had met me at old pre-wheelchair book signings, were now seeing me in a wheelchair and finding out for the first time, OMG, what happened, you weren’t in a wheelchair the last book signing, yadda, yadda… which was fine, that part wasn’t the issue.

…the issue started showing up a few months later at additional book signings when people, now knowing I was in a wheelchair, would show up, NOT to get a book signed, NOT to talk about their fave characters, no… people who never read my books, didn’t know me or my characters, would see the wheelchair and show up to gush:

“OMG! You have such an advantage! I want to write disabled characters, but I don’t know what it’s like to be in a wheelchair. You must be so good at writing wheelchair characters. What did you write! How many of your characters are in a wheelchair? Can you teach me how to write wheelchair characters? If I was you I would write so many disabled characters to be the heros, can you imagine how much of an inspiration you could be to people in wheelchairs?”

And it wasn’t one or two people. No. It was just endless person after person, getting in line for my book signing, not to get a signature, but instead to just have an excuse to come tell me what an inspiration my wheelchair was, ask questions about writing wheelchair characters, and tell me how lucky I was I didn’t have to research to write about being in a wheelchair!

AARRRRRRRRRRGH!

At that point I had NEVER written a disabled character at all.

But after this started happening, I started paying attention to disabled characters in fiction and suddenly I started to realize they ALL existed ONLY to inspire other characters.

And I hated it.

So here I was with this super villain character (The Pink Necromancer, who at the time was the grandfather of the main character, but since has become the main character himself) whom was rarely seen, usually only mentioned in passing, and my readers were always asking “When are you gonna reveal him?”

And I thought… okay, I’m going to spite the inspiration wheelchair character trope… my villain uses a cane, a walker, a rollator, and a wheelchair changing throughout the day depending on his needs, and he hates people telling him he inspires them, so, he carries his cane when in his wheelchair SPECIFICALLY so he can bash people over the head when they start calling him inspiring. He don’t take no “oooooh you are soooo inspiriting” bs from hno one. And he’s a necromancer, so he don’t bash them on the head to hurt them, no. He kills them and resurrects them as zombie minions.

NOW… I get people show up at book signings yelling :

“OMG! You can’t write disabled people this way! How is this inspiring! Cripples are supposed to be inspiring! He is evil! You can’t have evil characters be disabled! How is this going to inspire anyone?””

And I respond: “He’s not supposed to be inspiring. He’s doing to idiots what I would like to do every time some ableist calls my wheelchair an inspiration. I’m not in a wheelchair to be a performing monkey for your inspirational entertainment. I write my disabled characters ACTUATLY, from the pain and limits… right down to the frustrations of dealing with abelists who see nothing wrong with using us as their inspirational poster child. I became crippled when I was 8 months pregnant, and a crazed woman with a golf club, severed my spine and bashed my babies head in, I spent 9 years relearning to walk, and the FBI is 13 years into the murder investigation and not yet identified the attacker who crippled me and killed my baby, both violently with a golf club… my son’s murder didn’t happen to inspire you, I’m not crippled to inspire you either, and if I want to write a wheelchair bound necromancer serial killer who so I can take out my rage at abelists, that’s what I’m gonna do!”

Maybe some wheelchair bound authors want to be inspirations and write inspirational disabled characters, but I’m not one of them. Why? Maybe I don’t think my son was murdered for YOUR ENTERTAINMENT! Maybe, I don’t think romanticizing my suffering is a thing I like you doing. They CLAIM they want accurate disabled characters?

But give them a character full of pain and frustration and rage at abelists and they claim he ain’t accurate because he ain’t “inspirational”

Show a character fall out of his wheelchair and not be able to get up on his own, show the able bodied people around him pointing and laughing and tossing his wheelchair in the river… and readers scream “that ain’t accurate, all non disabled people are good and helpful and help cripples”… no they don’t…

…more then a dozen times now at Rotary Park in Biddeford Maine I’ve had to deal with people grabbing my cane out of my hand, tossing it in the Saco River, then kick me in the back while screaming “FAKER!” and not once did any able bodied person help me even though every time there were at least thirty witnesses… most of whom were too busy filming what was going on for TikTok memes to even care that I was hurt.

…twice now at that same park my wheelchair has been grabed, me flung out of it, and the chair tossed in the river.

I am ambulatory wheelchair user , and so I can stand; I can even walk about 15 steps, and people always get weird about it… most people are just confused and surprised… but once in a while I get the “FAAAKER!” crazies.

Once while at a dog park with my dog, a woman ran over, dumped my out of my wheelchair and flung it in the river, and then started yelling “Told you she was faking! See she can stand up!” Then she went into the rant about her tax money buying my wheelchair which meant it was her wheelchair… uhm… what?

I’m not on government assistant, I don’t get a disability check, I paid cash for my wheelchair and I had to save up for two years to do that… wtf?

People get so weird around wheelchair users, but even weirder if you are ambulatory wheelchair user. (I have MS, Rheumatism, and a spinal cord injury, thus the wheelchair).

No… no you jackass able bodied people DO NOT help disabled people… you just like the say you would to make yourselves look good, but you wouldn’t actually help and you know you wouldn’t.

That is WHY you NEED to read about disabled characters as inspiration, because you are incabable of seeing us as real people, you are only cabable of seeing us as tool and pawns for your own spiritual advancement.

You not only don’t help us, you go out of your way to hurt us more and make life even harder then it already is.

You want a crippled author who writes crippled characters ACTUALLY ACURATLY? Well you sure as hell got one now.

I don’t sugar coat my crippled character to match your fucking fanntasy of able bodies helping the poor little cripple who inspired them… I write from the crippled point of view, I write the neglect, the abuse, the pain, the suffering…

…able bodied readers don’t want crippled ACCURACY, they want feel good pills to make them think they are good people, because they know deep down inside they are NOT good people, and THAT is why they need to use us as inspiration.

Honey… if you need a cripple person to inspire you to do good… then you are a fucked up person, because that means you were incapable of just being a good person on your own.

If you were ACTUALLY a good person, you wouldn’t need to use us cripples as you crutch excuse for being good.

We shouldn’t hAVE to inspire you to do good. You should be able to do good things on your own.

You want to tell me my character isn’t accurate because he’s too disabled, in too mucch pain, gets abused too often by too many people, is too helpless, needs too much help from others, and is filled with rage so much that he kills his abusers?

… honey… his pain, his neglect, his being abused, his being taken advantage of, his rage against abelists trying to use us wheelchair users as inspiration is VERY accurate... you’ve just lived with your head so far up your privilaged arse, that you couldn’t see the reality of the pain and suffering behind you need to feel inspired.