The way that you speak about your diverse identity matters.
The way that you speak about your diverse identity matters.
It matters how you talk about your experience, how you advocate for people with your same diverse lived experience. The way that you show up with your diversity will make an impact on the way that your diversity is received.
Now, I want to be clear- there's a really important distinction between the way that you speak about your diverse experience and someone being discriminatory towards you.
The way that I like to phrase it is that about 95% of the people in the world that you meet are good-hearted, kind individuals who want to treat you and your diverse experience with respect. There will always be, unfortunately, that 5% of the world who are discriminatory, who are ableist, racist, sexist, and they are derogatory towards you because of your lived experience.
That is something that cannot be avoided. It is a part of what you signed up for and also did not sign up for.
However, the way that you approach sharing and advocating for your diverse experience has a significant impact in the way that someone receives your advocacy.
From my perspective, there's been a huge shift from when I first started advocating for my needs and for myself and for the disabled community. Initially, I was coming from a place of anger because I was starting to notice the way that I was discriminated against. A lot of this discrimination was subconscious. However, because I had not fully processed my own baggage, I wasn't able to show up with a level of openness and kindness when I was advocating for myself or meeting someone. This often left people feeling attacked. They felt like I was coming after them on a personal level and I was telling them what they were doing wrong, rather than what they could do to connect with me and to be accessible towards me and accepting of me.
The key problem here was that I had not processed through my own pain.
So the first step is to find a mental health professional who can truly help you to process through all of the crap that you have experienced because of your diverse identity. And that can take time. That's step one.
Step two is developing the ability to come to a conversation about your diverse experience with a recognition of the other person's intentions, which 95% of the time are going to be kind-hearted. When you do this, you will open up a dialogue that is inviting and encouraging.
When you lead with kindness, you're not letting go of what you need! You're still going to say: "This is my accessibility need, this is my diverse identity, and this is the way that you should be treating it." However, you're going to come at conversation with an invitation, rather than a fierce, forceful pushing away. When we invite someone else into the conversation with kindness, with humor, with generosity, we create allies.
And at the end of the day, you have to think, "what am I trying to accomplish here? Am I trying to make another enemy that will discriminate against me? Or, am I trying to make someone who is going to be afraid of constantly doing the wrong thing? Or, do I want to invite this person in to my experience in order to create a friend- to have a connection with them that lets them know that it is okay to make mistakes, and that they can just let go of their fear of failure around people with diverse experiences?"
I think we all know the answer here.
So remember, there will be moments where people are just downright discriminatory. But that is the exception, not the rule!
95% of the time, you do have a responsibility and an opportunity to share and advocate for the people with your diverse identity, and you can do so with openness and kindness, and a loving heart. And if you do, I promise you, not only are you going to create a friend, but you're going to feel more at peace, more accomplished, and more in love with yourself and your experience.
As always, I've got your back. ❤️
Let me know if you have any questions.
Sending love,
Charlie