Beyond Labels: What Lies Beneath Adjectives

What is beautiful? Who defines what is beautiful and what is ugly? “Beautiful” and “ugly” are qualifying adjectives, which add qualities to what is being described from the point of view of the observer, exactly like “tall” or “short” depending on the perspective of the one who makes the judgment. 

Being a woman with a disability is not easy, because you, too, are often a victim of double discrimination. On the one hand because you are a woman, and therefore subject to the differentiations that the feminist movements remind us with their important battles such as that against wage inequality, on the other hand because you are disabled and therefore considered universally incapable of achieving a goal, doing a job, etc.

The most difficult period in the life of a person with a disability is undoubtedly adolescence. In fact, it is the period when everyone begins the first discoveries of them self and others, when everyone tries to hide alleged imperceptible imperfections inside loose and shapeless clothes, a girl with a disability begins to deal with a changing body that will never respond to the aesthetic canons of the show-girls society, and will never be able to hide inside a sweater.

Teenagers with disabilities thus find themselves at a crossroads, an ultimatum without return as Kirkegaard would have said: hide in the warmth of their own room away from indiscretion, or venture out and learn to live life without being influenced by the judgment of others. This also means growing bigger.

To make the choice of life between living or watching others live, role models are important, and the example of Melissa Blake, an American disability blogger, can be determination for many girls. And lots of guys. The woman, suffering from Freeman-Sheldon syndrome that affects her physical appearance, had suffered many attacks from peers who claimed that she could never reach her dream of modeling, yet she was still called to parade for New York Fashion Week, against all prejudice. But social media, we know, is often the den of cowards who hide behind a monitor to vomit hatred and repeatedly subject others to body shaming, to which she has been able to respond with a surprising irony: if someone criticizes her claiming that she should be banned from social media for her appearance… she responds by posting a series of selfies.
What Melissa Blake teaches us is to not let us be stopped by the adjectives that surround us and describe us, because what is under those adjectives can only be decided by us.