Introduction
Flight From Disability: How I Ran Toward Cultural Ableism Without Realising It
I grew up with disability long before I had a name for it. My little brother had a host of difficulties as a toddler and a young child – he had limited hearing on one side, a learning disability, and he couldn’t run or jump too well. Long before I was old enough to understand the politics of inclusion or the failures of systems, I understood the not-so-quiet frustration of watching him struggle with things that came easily to other children. I also understood responsibility of being the older sibling, the one who things came easily to and took on my role to teach and protect.
I was ten, when he, 7 at the time, was diagnosed with a progressive degenerative genetic condition. I realized quickly after that that it was the end of any childhood either of us were going to have. We had to now outrun time and do what we could to keep him alive. I had to make sure I wasn’t adding to the burden in any way and learnt to be always helpful. I also learnt to not think about it too much and to not ask for anything. I was emotionally checked – out much of my adolescence. I realize now that I didn’t just grow up around disability. I grew up fleeing it.
In the places where identity forms, where preferences crystallise, where the nervous system decides what is safe and what is overwhelming, I learned to run.
I ran from the emotional weight that sat in our living room, from worry and dread, from frustrations of limited mobility and falls, from shame. I could not wait to leave the house.
It took years to name this for what it was: not a lack of compassion, not a personal failing, but a survival response. A flight response, shaped by a child trying to manage more than her body could metabolise.
The nervous system remembers roles long after we outgrow them
As therapists, we talk about “role assignments” in families. I didn’t need a theoretical model to describe mine — it was obvious. I was the responsible one, the organised one, the one who stepped in where systems and adults sometimes stepped back. Responsibility taught me how to organize and control helplessness, so I never had to feel it.
In adolescence, university, and eventually in my clinical training, I found myself gravitating away from anything that resembled my childhood landscape. I still played similar roles of the responsible, organized one. I was always calm under pressure and had compassion for most. However, when placements involved physical disabilities or intellectual disabilities, I felt a familiar tug of helplessness. A wish to be somewhere else. I told myself it just “wasn’t my area,” but internally I knew it was more. It was the territory I had survived, and I didn’t want to go back.
Culture reinforced the escape route
In many cultures, including mine, disability is whispered about, softened, disguised, or heroised in ways that don’t honour the complexity of real lives. Ableism becomes quiet and ambient, like background noise you stop noticing. It teaches you that disability is something to pity, manage, rise above, or politely avoid.
We don’t learn to sit with it.
So my flight response had cultural approval. It didn’t look like avoidance; it looked like ambition. It sounded like “I’m studying hard and doing important things,” which was true, but incomplete.
I was a safe distance away from my childhood and the realities of my family’s life. I was immersed in theories, concepts and history. I was helping people deal with their mental health difficulties with everything I had studied. I didn’t need to pay attention to what I had embodied, my own history that whispered relentlessly.
My professional choices made perfect sense and yet they were also a continuation of a pattern my nervous system started decades earlier.
The quiet cost of running
Flight is smart survival. It keeps us going, functioning. It lets us build adulthood without collapsing under childhood burdens. But it also narrows the world. I realise now that my avoidance came with silent losses, lost opportunities for understanding, lost nuance, lost softness toward parts of myself shaped by that early caregiving.
Writing about this now isn’t about correcting that avoidance; it’s about recognising it. Honouring it, even. Because flight kept me intact when I needed it most.
What I’m unlearning
This year, as I thought about beginning this blog series, the theme of “flight” felt like the only honest place to start. Not as a confession, but as an acknowledgment that therapists, too, carry nervous systems shaped by the worlds we grew up in.
And sometimes what we specialise in and what we refuse tells the story our mouth hasn’t said out loud yet.
I still don’t specialise in disability, and I don’t intend to. But I’m no longer pretending it’s simply a career preference. It’s a memory. A role. A landscape my body once had to escape to survive.
Naming that feels like a kind of return to truth.
A slow, gentle turning toward a part of my history I’ve kept at the edges of my professional identity.
This is the beginning of that turning.
