Title

I feel that I don’t truly belong anywhere.

As a brown migrant Muslim woman, my intersecting identities allow me to be a part of diverse communities, but parts of me are not accepted and get left behind.

A couple of years ago, I was moving out of college. Ma was visiting and wanted to help but she didn’t want to taint my chance of acceptance because of her hijab and salwar kameez.

I felt hyper aware of my differences as if she brought to light what I had been hiding. I moulded myself more into white Australian culture.

At my new shared house, I frequently made excuses to avoid drinking for weekly wine nights. You know, the “I’ve got a headache” or “Sorry, early day tomorrow”.

In Ramadan, I fasted on snacks that I could keep in my room overnight. Slowly, I began sneaking into our kitchen to eat properly before my fast began. Eventually my housemates put two and two together.

I felt like I owed them for tolerating me despite my differences.

With the added pressure to bridge our gap and meet them on common ground, I hid my prayer scarf and avoided talking about religion or faith.

Today, I openly practice hijab.

Subtitle

I juggle different parts of my identity in every community that welcomes me, but no matter how hard I try, my whole person never quite fits.

I find myself negotiating social situations with even immediate family and close friends, between maintaining these relationships and standing up for myself.

My intersectional identities afford me this tolerance for discrimination. To me, this is the cost of intersectionality.

This all makes maintaining social circles and even support networks really draining, and sometimes even costly to my well-being.

My family and friends often ask me if I really need to make my life harder by calling myself disabled, that everyone has difficulties that they cope with without making it their identity, and perhaps I’d help myself more by just trying harder.

Having to prove my diagnoses is a painful burden.

Subtitle

Disability is an afterthought even amongst those closest to me.

I don’t feel safe or comfortable even with friends, because my disability is forgotten, seen as an inconvenience, or even a ploy.

When disability is attributed as inherent to me, rather than the circumstances that disable me, I am being conditioned to believe that the problem lies with me. This is insidious and upholds the structures that disable us and keep us from living the life we want.

Whether you’re disabled or not, we all have strategies and systems in place to make sure that everything keeps ticking over. The difference is noticeable though, when each step forwards puts us three steps back. Let me tell you, it really adds up.

I became a disability advocate out of necessity.

The otherness I have felt from years of being misunderstood was alienating and still affects me. We have to see the person first, a failure to foster spaces that empower our intersectional identities hurts the abled and disabled community.

We can strive for true inclusion, but only if we first heal together as a community with disability justice at its heart. Nothing about us without us.