HANNAH DIVINEY
Actor and advocate Hannah Diviney is the author of ‘I’ll Let Myself In’ (Allen & Unwin).
Many Aussie fans missed out on Taylor Swift tickets. But thanks to an inaccessible ticketing system, for those with a disability it was more than bad blood.
I first figured out I was disabled when I was three years old. Being aware of that difference has impacted every aspect of my life: my self-worth, my sense of what’s important, my relation-ships with every single person in my world, the things I value, the things I’m passionate about, the things I couldn’t bother giving even an ounce of energy to. Literally everything. In fact, there are probably ways I don’t know about yet that I’ll discover in years to come, but that’s what therapy is for!
Ableism is forgotten because it’s so easily baked into our every-day life that it’s harder to register as a prejudice unless you’re being super vigilant. It’s not as obvious and it doesn’t neces-sarily flash in neon like racism or homophobia for people to pick up on. It’s present everywhere from the minute we all wake up in the morning. I think the reason it’s been able to thrive for so long is because of the lack of visibility of disabled people in everyday life. If people were more aware of our existence – not just as a concept or an abstract group but as real people – that would help. I’m 24 and when I was born, there were still beliefs that the best thing for children with disabilities was institution-alisation. In light of that, we’ve come a long way, but we still have so far to go.
As an example,
