Not a hero story

On Jason Arday and how acceptance isn't believing people are someone they're not

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

I have a disabled older sibling. Without going into the details of his life, I think it could have been more fulfilling and more connected to others than it has been. It’s a difficult thing to claim, not least because I know he wouldn’t want to think that. What would be the point? So I try not to say it too often. Nonetheless, I just don’t think anyone is born to be on the outside as much as he has been.

I don’t have a precise picture of what another life would have been like. I know my parents had this image of ‘the non-disabled version of him’ but that isn’t what I mean. I’m thinking of earlier, more informed diagnoses. The possibility to work, in a job with sufficient support. More options to share his perspective, not in some amazing memoir or novel which ‘shows what it’s like to be me’ (one that shows that he is, in fact, a genius beneath it all). Just more friends his own age. Nothing dramatic, just not ‘people who are born this way are destined to have sad lives’. Why can’t they have ordinary, bog-standard, up-and-down lives?

Obviously many people prefer miracles and stories of triumph over adversity. They prefer to think that as long as you don’t write people off and find ways to get them to believe in themselves, you can discover ways in which actually, their challenges are what make them extra-brilliant. Far more satisfying than turning the whole of society upside down only for the people you’ve been trying to help to have mundane lives, albeit ones in which additional care and attention is constantly required. This is the thing that’s been bothering me about the Jason Arday debacle (even more than the ‘everyone plagiarises when writing their thesis’ defence – I bloody well didn’t!). It’s the way in which none of the disability element says anything about people like my brother. None of it ever did – I can’t think of ways in which Arday’s ‘nonverbal at 11, only learned to read at 18’ story did much for anyone else in a similar situation. It was a hero story, not a lesson for carers and families. It flattered people who thought they were facilitating the rise of someone who’d faced extraordinary odds when all it shows is, they just weren’t the same odds that others in a superficially similar situation face. I don’t think this story was constructed without everyone involved knowing that it failed to differentiate between lifelong, extreme difficulties and less devastating ones, all the better to boot Arday’s status.

I think it is harmful. It feeds into the message that if your life’s not extraordinary, what’s the point of you with your special needs, your extra demands, your endless, endless struggles? Aren’t you meant to provide some insight for the rest of us? Throughout his life, my brother has been taught that somehow, he’s not the person he’s meant to be – that another, more ‘successful’ self should be there in his place. For those who want hidden geniuses, valuing people for who they are is reframed as writing them off. There are nonverbal autistic children who will be nonverbal for the whole of their lives, without there being a secret, supposedly existence-justifying narrative within them.

Obviously I may be over-personalising and reading too much into this. But just as the Salt Path scandal showed how people want to believe a degenerative disorder can be ‘walked off’, and the Jack Monroe scandal showed people want to believe poverty can be solved with ‘thrift’, I think this one shows – amongst plenty of other things – that people want to believe ‘accepting’ someone is actually believing they’re someone else.