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“Let Me Help You”
Why you should never force help on a disabled person.
If I had a dollar for every time someone approached me and said, “Let me help you,” I’d have my student loans paid off.
I’m just kidding…I’ll never finish paying off my student loans.
Anyway, today’s topic: offering help versus forcing help on people with disabilities.
If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s okay. It’s not your fault because this isn’t a conversation we often have. It’s probably not something you encounter on a daily or even a semi-regular basis, so you likely don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to disability. And again, that’s okay.
Before my accident, I’d had very little experience with disability. In fact, while I was doing my physical rehabilitation, I would attend weekly patient education classes because I was ignorant of a great number of things and had many incorrect preconceived ideas about people with disabilities.
The patient education classes not only gave me the information I needed to function once I was home from the hospital, but they also helped me begin to understand the nature of my disability and who I could be going forward.
One thing we covered was how we as newly disabled people (these were classes held for people in the…
