I used to feed the crows on campus every day because it was easier than making human friends (I had one already - and Robin likes crows as much as I do). Pretty soon, they figured out where I lived and would alight upon my dorm windowsill and watch me. I offered them only healthy things, like leftover fish, hard boiled eggs, nuts, suet, and dog food. They were already habituated to humans and had no fear of us, and I figured it was better to feed them real food instead of the french fries they’d get tossed.
It only got weird when people began to notice that crows would follow me to class. Two in particular would fly alongside me as I walked across campus, landing and cawing for treats and keeping pace with me. Sometimes people would try to scare them off and I’d have to explain that Heinrich and Fatima weren’t bad omens signaling my doom, just spoiled little brats.
That is the most adorable thing that i have ever heard.
Is funny when doctors and other peeps act like my problem is that I’m obsessed w/ my disability. Um no. You have it backwards. The problem is I HAVE to be cuz it is a constant problem.
I’m deaf. About 25 years ago, I was working for a little while as a classroom aide at a program that worked with deaf children with multiple disabilities. All the teachers and other classroom aides were hearing, but they all could sign. Not at native signing level, but enough to carry on a basic conversation.
So, one evening, all us adults bring all the kids to a special one-night camping trip. All the kids are put to sleep, which frees up the adults to get into a circle and have some fun to ourselves for a while. People start talking, except they were forgetting to sign. So I reminded them to please sign so I could understand them. One of them told me that, no, they weren’t going to sign because this was our night to have fun and not have to think about communication.
So no one signed all night. They talked, they laughed, they had fun. I sat, feeling lost and cut off and betrayed. I remember wishing I had had the nerve to say, “No, what you mean is, you want a night in which everyone EXCEPT ME gets to not think about communication.”
I think sometimes when non-disabled people insist that we are too obsessed with our disability, what they REALLY mean is, “I wish you would stop reminding me that I have a shared responsibility as a fellow member of society to proactively ensure that we all have an opportunity to be engaged in society. I wish you would just pretend to not have a disability so I can pretend that I don’t have to do anything to enable you to do the same things the rest of us are doing.”
The luxury of not needing to think about disability in a society that is designed to lock us on the cold outside is a non-disabled privilege.
