disability – Dawn Sanders

Life in the UK

By Dawn M. Sanders

In a nutshell, it sucks! After being here nearly 35 years, I can finally admit, more to myself than anyone, I’m sick and tired of being unhappy, missed opportunities and maybe what could be dubbed ‘drifter syndrome’. Since being here I’ve lived in London, Brighton, Aberystwyth in Wales, rural Derbyshire, Sheffield and now Exeter, just looking for somewhere to call home and welcomes as home.
I won’t go through the full history of how I immigrated here or why, I’ll save that for my autobiography when the time comes, but what I ‘will say’ is I left California, USA, not just because I never fit in there or never felt at home – it was a much more spiritual thing I would later come to understand after being in the UK for 8 years – it was through a shamanic journey, the first of several where I was guided through the experience, where I knew I had been here before and where at least half of my unknown ancestry originated on this side of the pond, in France.
Fast forwarding onto when I actually came here for the second time after only coming the year before on holiday and deciding to return to what felt like home, was I hit with the reality of my young, probably green and ill-thought-out plan to change my life forever.
Then again, I hadn’t gone on the journey until the year 2000 after landing here in ’92. In the first 8 years alone, I had become homeless, got rehoused late in pregnancy with my son, had my son and was raising him as a single mum and had put down my pagan roots in Brighton.
When first coming here on that 6 month work visa, 24 and as green as the English rain-drenched grass, little did I know I would face discrimination I had never faced before.
Little did I know, trying to find a job in a new and unfamiliar, well at least superficially unfamiliar country would mean, facing awkward reactions from people on first sight of me with a visual impairment.
When I got here on that cold January day in 1992 and checked into the YWCA hostel in central London, I was faced with a few spinster type middle-aged women who reacted to me as if I had just dropped in from outer space, rather than the US.
Chinese whispers were everywhere – many of which weren’t whispers at all, but statements of pure ignorance and my visual impairment, what I had lived with all my life, was suddenly like some debilitating curse.
There was a ‘huge issue’ made of me going up and down the stairs, where my room was on the second floor, as if being visually impaired extended to my “ability” to climb stairs and oh yes, it was all about ability and what others perceived was possible.
“That poor girl is in there trying to cook.” I overheard one day when I just made noodles boiled in a pan.
When a taxi driver dropped me off at this nondescript building for a job interview and opened the door to the place he gasped – ”There are loads of stairs.”
Walking down the street carefully learning my new environment I would hear:
“Are you alright?” in that sing-song, downward pointing patronising voice I came to recognise and all too familiar with, as if recoiling upon clapping their eyes on me – had British society never seen a woman with a visual impairment before? Was I supposed to be tucked away behind closed doors somewhere?
I remember in those early days having to seek counselling, because people just couldn’t fucking lay off me – decades later not much has changed as Joe/Jane off the street, on a bus, a crowded café, music gig or any given place out-and-about, I am still likely to get grabbed at, as if I’m moving furniture, not a woman where consent and communication count in the same way as if I wasn’t visually impaired.
What I’ve just described goes much further than how British society reacts to a woman with a visual impairment…
There’s not being able to get a job, due to the sheer level of discrimination, short-sightedness or blinkered mentality I encounter daily.
I remember going for some telesales job where, I got through the office space fine, but the woman there said something like, ‘look I know this is really gonna fuck with you, but Guide Dogs for the Blind (an organisation I wasn’t familiar with at the time, never wanting a guide dog) but they said the place would have been unsuitable for a person with a visual impairment, as the tables and chairs were all over the place.
Well duh, all it would have taken was some rearranging of the furniture to make things more access-friendly, but it was the 90s, I still didn’t know anything of the lack of legislation the UK had in place at that time – I just stupidly thought it would be fair as it was for going for a job in California, where things were made possible and I got respect for what I ‘could do’ rather than be faced with constant barriers of what people presumed I ‘couldn’t do.
I remember walking down a platform with a London Transport worker to get help getting a tube and some girl comes up and says, not to me but to the transport worker: “Who does her makeup?” The poor guy didn’t know what to say, so I said something like: “Why don’t you ask her.” But Brits weren’t used to such forthrightness and people often were shocked at my audacity to speak up for myself – something I learned to do on a daily basis as a cultural consequence of being here.
At the time I hadn’t fully studied or realised the institutionalised oppression.
Looking for a room to rent was no better – I remember getting all the way out to Leytonstone in East London where I was answering an ad, but as soon as I got out of the taxi and was met by the person who was renting out the room I got, ‘um, you’re at the wrong place. I was a bit green, but not stupid enough to believe a lie at the freakout in someone having a woman with a visual impairment turn up – shock horror!
In the States life was never perfect in how I was received being VI, but it was nothing like what I’ve come across in the ensuing years of living here.
Dating or being received as a social/sexual being was pretty much off the menu, as I navigated my way through early motherhood in Brighton. Many of my mates didn’t have kids and only one at the time was also a single mum, but even fleeting boyfriends were extremely rare and, as far as I was concerned, usually socially inept.
Although much of my bad experiences here have been due to my visual impairment, there are of course those little positives that stand out and remind me everything is not all bad.

After dancing through hoops to get some much-needed dental work done and just that first appointment – I finally got something as a one-off through the NHS – that treasured public service privatisation hasn’t completely gulped up, yet.
So, when I walked into the building that was the dental practice – turns out it was an old converted cottage as I asked going up the narrow staircase. I always appreciated the old buildings which adorn this country, steeped in its history.
One of my favourite pubs in Sheffield, The Old Queens Head, was built in something like 1476 and where we used to have the Socialist Party meetings in a big dining room upstairs.

Old Queen's Head Pub — The Old Queen’s Head Pub by Brlazarov, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Getting introduced to university life surprisingly came with a good mature students’ union and I made some cool connections, but I stood out like a deviant sore thumb and unless they were superficial acquaintances, the marginalisation, the loneliness was ever present – in lecture theatres, sitting alone in pubs while everyone around me sat with friends…. The loneliness is like my shadow – always with me, just more acute when sitting in a crowd – on my own on a beach or anywhere.
I found some kind of solace in political activism, as that first degree was post-9/11 and joining the anti-Iraq campaign meant going on mass demonstrations which, actually started before I left Brighton and set me on something purposeful.
However, even on the UK left, if you have a visible ‘difference’ you’re pigeonholed as “the ‘dis-abled” which I’ll ‘never’ subscribe to as empowering or egalitarian identity language – yet it’s the mainstay in a society steeped in classist division.
In the last year I’ve even started the process of applying for citizenship and reading the Life in the UK, the book you have to read for all the answers to UK citizenship, but the process has hit a barrier and stalled. I started this, not because I particularly have experienced nirvana in this country, but so I can vote and make the difference I want for marginalised people and communities.
After my first degree, where I felt supported, yet stepping out into the real world would of course be fraught with discrimination and labels as, it didn’t matter what qualification one gained academically – the song remained the same.
I threw myself in the years that followed university and leaving Aberystwyth, a small Welsh town full of prejudice and anti-outsider syndrome, into activism, alternative communities where I could find them, because marginalised or off-grid perspectives, for the most part, were more accepting.
That said, when I went with my toddler son in tow, to escape the mainstream pressures with professionals on my son and I like flies, due to his special needs, I still was faced with, ‘um, I’m glad you’re here, but shouldn’t you be asking for a council house?
I already had one back in Brighton at the time, it just seemed to be unheard of, that I would want to jump ship from conventional society for something more meaningful again, always always, because of my visual impairment, it was assumed I needed to be wrapped in cotton wool, safely within the clutches of the conventional rat race, so we spent the first two weeks in the communal tipi at Tipi Valley, at the top of South Wales, before I got us a static caravan someone was selling for a few hundred.
All of this said, life in the UK as I’ve experienced it, hasn’t been all about my visual impairment and people’s reactions, although it has been 90 per cent of it.

There’s experiencing the age-old British class system firsthand when I went to apply for council housing and was met with, ‘You will not get your hands on our housing stock’ a woman at the housing office in Exeter practically shouted at me – even though I was entitled to it and homeless.
My son wasn’t with me at the time, luckily.
Being a single mum just doubled the stigma and has made life like wading through quicksand.
My son and I enjoyed a fairly non-conventional lifestyle in his formative and those colourful years – not something I can say would have ever happened in California, in all its normality and skin-deep lack of culture.
So, why don’t I just go back? Well, it’s not ‘that easy’ for better or worse my life is here, home is here and so is my son.
Meeting him on one of the shamanic journeys, showed me the spiritual and past-life insight that, we had met before and in fact are soul mates.
Had I not come to the UK, met a random stranger in a rough-and-ready biker pub down near the canal in Camden Town, I would have never met my hero, my soul mate and my best friend.
Like with anyone, friends have come and gone, so has the very occasional partner. Of course I could ‘never go back – not with the likes of a modern-day dictator, a psychopath holding the country I once knew as mine to ransom, now as a place I no longer recognise.
Yes, life in the UK is hard, what should be easy and uncomplicated is always made twice as difficult with the imposition of modernity, supposedly advancing technology and a loss of communities.
I felt more treated as an equal when I lived in a staunchly Asian neighbourhood in Sheffield, where people were more working-class, had experienced hardship or discrimination themselves.
I mean, I’ve been at birdcage level and on top of the world – both when I was pregnant and homeless with my son and graduating university for the first time and celebrated on a warm summer’s day on my favourite promenade pub on Aberystwyth Beach, with a few mates at the time, my lad and a short-lived partner.

Aberystwyth beach and seafront by Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Life has been dark, several shades of grey, yet as colourful and striking as a dazzling psychedelic chaos lightshow and crazy day at Glastonbury.

When I think of what I left in the States – my estranged family; a good job; my own place and at least a degree of respectability which, was long before I held the two degrees I now have hanging on my wall, not having helped me in the slightest with employment or economic independence. When I think of where I’m at – the stalemate of middle-age, losing myself to the constant concerns of my adult son and his additional needs…
When I reflect as I often do on, ‘would I really have been better off? I guess the answer is – ‘ya win some, ya lose some.
It’s my son who keeps me somehow focused.

He’s all I have for family in the whole country and I’m all he has, so we help each other and communicate in a way few people understand – I would simply never walk away from my hero the Wind Beneath my Wings – even though pushing my 6th decade, I’m really not flying.

Gagged, But Only for Now in Not Complying with the Class Pecking Order

By Dawn M. Sanders

How can one begin the healing process after ten plus years of being demonised and shackled by a system which treats single mothers or families from marginalised communities with heavy-handed control and the distain one would expect as a criminal or pariah, just for daring to stand up for our human rights and the truth?

Just in writing this piece alone is where I start, but there is anything but closure…

When I published this long-form piece in Barriers to Bridges – the online magazine I previously founded, not only did it fail to get the exposure it needed to draw attention to something rarely reported by mainstream or even alternative outlets, following on it has only been half the story.

As the above piece is long-form, I will just summarise – it provides a snapshot into the life I built raising my son as a single mum. His additional needs became more complex as he grew with diagnoses and intervention, but we had love and support in the early years.

He thrived at his special school, had a rich and alternative childhood and formative years, but then the tidal wave of change which caged a young bird just as his wings were about to spread has scarred us both for life.

When I wrote the piece in 2023 it had already dragged on for seven agonising years – the face-to-face lies which became courtroom lies; the demonising and framing me, a mother with a visual impairment; as an ogre, the disproportionate and blatant bias of a judge who had already made his decision before the hearings. The opposing parties barely played the charade of courtroom pleasantries, as their job was and always is, to smear the accused, the defendant, by reducing them to mere scapegoats for a system which fundamentally failed my son, but remember this was not a criminal case of abuse. If anyone has been abused in this scenario it has been my son and I. It was and still is, a game I refused to play so my son and I have paid the price.

I just hope anyone reading this synopsis of the whole ordeal, will take time to read the above article. Since that piece was published, there were several episodes of my son protesting for hours before getting in the car to be driven back up to his life of misery after weekends of visiting me, by the next year I refused to allow him to be taken back, a court order mandated him staying here and he now is living with me, as I recently found us a larger accommodation so his support workers have a bedroom and everyone has plenty of space. Oh, but you can better believe the vultures, as I’ve dubbed them for many years, didn’t like it.

Suffice to know, the hearings have continued and the new local authority where we reside are just as corrupt if not worse as the first where we moved to in 2010 and finally pulled my son from their authoritarian clutches.

As the current local authority spent several hearings blundering, spitting out half-baked mudballs at me – making things up and changing their position as they went along, they had opportunity after opportunity in hearing after hearing. Yet, – they brought nothing to the table, as they wanted to move my son again against his will – even after I had just found us our new rented house. At the final hearing, for now according to the court, when the local authority seemed to come to some kind of coherence, the judge halted further hearings – preventing me from giving evidence to confirm and set the record straight on false allegations set against me. So busy were the other parties hellbent on painting me as a difficult monster, not a single word was spoken on further efforts I had just made in addition to the lengthy battle, to improve our living situation.

In fact, if ever there was a blatant example of a spokesman for the judicial system spelling out how single mums on low incomes should ‘know their place’ – it came when, in the closing spoken statement, ‘so, Ms. Sanders has found a property, a necessary move, calling the shots’…

A’hum, no I’m not supposed to “call the shots” or be proactive as an educated and conscientious mother, I’m supposed to keep my head down and do what I’m told and let the ‘big people’ make all the decisions.

It was beyond nauseating and finally reached the point I couldn’t take anymore, so I left the remote hearing before it ended.

I’m not filling in all the gaps here, as I’ve at last reached the point where I need to move on, get myself back, ensure my son’s healing, wellbeing and recovery from his lost years are compensated for, with love, attention and self-fulfilment, but the process is slow.

I’ve decided to do what I have always intended, especially the longer the saga has dragged on and the more hurt and pain we have endured – I’m writing a book to chronical absolutely everything…

I have just this week reached out to Facebook groups for advice on starting the whole process. I’m returning to my journalism and authoring the book which already has a title and the same talented friend who designed the magazine covers of Barriers to Bridges, has agreed to design the book cover.

The plan is in the early stages as I consider appealing the case as well as, in a final attempt at autonomy in regaining responsibility of my son’s finances from the hands of the state vultures who took it from me some years ago.

Susan Hotin Renard wrote profound words of encouragement on the

Facebook group where I hinted at what the book would be addressing:

“I’m so sorry for what you’ve experienced. What you describe is something that frustrates me to no end here in the US as well.

The systematic dismantling of families by every means possible — through money, housing, food, medical care, and most of all, instability. It feels bound to become the very thing that erodes a culture’s humanity.

And you’re holding that story in your hands.”

Please visit this link and consider donating to the crowd-funder I’ve set up for obtaining legal aid funds for appointee-ship of my son’s finances in releasing the chokehold in this crucial area of his basic rights.

What It’s Worth to Feel Self Worth

By Dawn M. Sanders

Just as we stand on the threshold of the labyrinth of life, our position and place in society is mostly cemented – albeit with a little help from external factors, such as breaking glass ceilings or barrier gates.

I have written extensively on this stuff, such as the Right to Self-Fulfillment or the importance of agency and emancipation, so won’t repeat myself, yet it simply can’t be said enough…

I recently participated in a debating workshop where the issue was how class influences climate change and how it affects the working-class the most and a guy made the point how ‘dis-abled people are still treated as the under-class.

He’s right, but I made my habitual point when he, like so many, placed the label before people. later emphasising ‘people’ with disabilities are in fact entrepreneurs, homeowners and parents so are people first – as more than one person in the room spoke of how ‘dis-abled people are on benefits by default, so come from fixed incomes and are inherently downtrodden.

I read this story the other day with interest and took to Facebook – pointing out the condescending nature of the headline, “Disabled Man is Left Heartbroken…” Okay, so a lot of people prefer or don’t mind the social model of identity language, but it’s the way the media pushes for the all-encompassing label before the person or pity – adding to an unlevel playing field.

Yet, within the article Bryan is given his agency with his name and desire to become something from the age of 2 and despite his obvious experience of discrimination by a local authority, he didn’t just want to sit around and do nothing.

On a personal note, a week ago today, I guess I hit a kind of plateau – my last year of my 5^th decade, where next year will see my descend.

At the risk of my own middle-aged musings, the above story just kind of wrote the answer to my latest agonising and pondering on what the actual hell am I going to do with the rest of my time here?

While raising my son who has complex additional needs, getting him into a specialist school/college; then watching helplessly while he lost the formative years of his adulthood in decline, stagnation and isolation. I engaged with not one, but two degrees at university and several in-between qualifications. Okay, so I spent years with my head stuck in academia to gain my own since of agency and confidence in a fast-moving world, but my very first experiences of looking for work with a 6-month work visa on an American exchange programme here in the UK, were not good and fraught with the slightest reason to discriminate when I had gone from one job to a better job three-fold in the US – my country of origin.

A couple of failed businesses, a lot of political activism in staying the course as a lifelong tryer, I could well empathise with Bryan.

So, when I read his story and how his mother has advocated for him and complained of how he has been treated, I just thought, so if he gets that kind of treatment as a young man, who’s going to want me, out of the job market for decades, aging and oh, let’s not forget with a severe visual impairment?

As I have to stand and fight, fight, fight because, the hearings have continued after ten agonising years defending my family’s human rights and autonomy in court. Grovelling with the trail of pain it has caused my tiny family – the sadness, losing myself to my son’s needs, worries and of course my own need to literally do something for myself, the community and my political conscious – I have had to do this Eeny-meeny-miny-mo thing of:

Maybe do some volunteering but, would I be valued? Maybe try to relaunch Barriers to Bridges, the online platform I founded which formerly provided some of the most marginalised in society, a voice, but it needs to be sustained and monetised.

Get more involved politically, locally – well, I’ve tried and the cliquey nature of Exeter and the southwest often looks like no entry signs with a superficial or fickle veneer – different from the north where it’s more working-class and warmer, despite the cooler temperatures…

I know, I know it all sounds like a lot of excuses and self-built barriers, but I need to be pragmatic with lived experience and wariness of all the new challenges within journalism itself – AI, the danger in being left-wing or just outspoken, but I’ve started with writing this, got the bright red fire back in my hair and nearly under my ass. Yet, with a never-ending battle comes exhaustion, black clouds and the deafening isolation and depression – whether I’m sitting in a crowded pub or within the sanctuary of my home, not to mention the sheer lack of motivation and lost confidence.

Like Bryan in the above story, I’m all too aware of the need for self-worth, my son’s need for self-worth and the burning desire to contribute to the world – use my skills, intelligence and lived experiences.

From the sounds of how Bryan describes his feeling of self-doubt after such a calloused rejection – I bet he wouldn’t mind being described as Bryan the binman – A Young man with his determination intact. Not “dis-abled man Rejected Twice after working for free.” Okay, it rightfully highlights the injustice is routinely faced by people with disabilities who often have to work harder to prove themselves and for that it has to be commended.

Nobody can put a price on self-worth and the confidence or since of wellbeing it brings us.

STOP DISSING AND START EMPOWERING

By Dawn M. Sanders

Last week witnessed the unleashing of, not only a budget and economic pledges or predictions we all feared, it was laced with the all-too-familiar ideologies embraced by the Tories.

We have a complex housing bill not yet understood by many, the rush to make every school (primary or secondary) an academy and most noteworthy, the further cuts to welfare benefits – adding to the despair of austerity.

So, focusing on the ‘dis-ability cuts as they are inevitably coined, I’m taking this opportunity to turn it all on its head by trumpeting my passions for equality, empowerment and true dignity…

Take note: I won’t be placing that all-prevailing, crippling label the main stay in this country insist on preceding before us as ‘people first’!

I have argued this point of contention time and again – mostly with ‘people’ with additional needs themselves and, I’m sticking to my guns!

My visual impairment is of course an integral part of my identity, but certainly not the first among equals in being a woman, mother or journalist…

A ‘dis-abled computer mouse is one that doesn’t work, ditto for toilets, cars etc.

Is it overly PC nit-picking? I think not…

As a journalist and writer, words, the connotations behind them and what they represent are hugely meaningful – especially when you’re on the receiving end of those negative connotations, such as lesser than, subordinate, weak – I could go on, but you get the gist.

The point is, just because I and others are visually impaired (or otherwise) doesn’t mean I can’t raise my son single-handedly as I’ve done; I still cook clean and maintain my home; I still have relationships with people in the human way most would expect and, I even enjoy some of life’s more clandestine pleasures…

This all isn’t to say for a second, that I and others don’t get blatant discrimination, especially in looking for work, social environments or on an equal playing field in the game of meeting a possible partner – in fact, being visually impaired, hearing impaired, wheelchair user, with learning/cognitive difficulties, is often an extremely isolating place to be.

However, the argument of the so-called “social model” which dictates all of these social/practical constraints should dub us as ‘dis-abled to the tune of how society sees myself and others is simply backwards.

It all hinges on, what one cannot do, rather than, what one can do…

Enough said, so when people go out in force – protesting their benefits are being taken away against a backdrop of: “Is This Any Way to Treat ‘dis-abled People” as the banner read, I’m insulted at being considered inherently vulnerable or fragile.

These people who, insist on milking an entrenched victim culture, one I have to fight against every day to “prove myself” a capable parent, employable or dare I say it, a sexual being, are ‘not doing me any favours’!

I’m forever infuriated at being lumped in a category of the “sick and ‘dis-abled” as people with long term illnesses have their own specific circumstances and anyone with severe/complex needs, is an individual – there’s never a one-size-fits-all…

Ultimately, do we not have the right ‘not to be impoverished’?

Why aren’t the likes of Dis-abled People Against the Cuts crying out for more equality in the workplace, employment or closing the loopholes within the so-called anti-discrimination act.

Yes, this government and its ideologies have handed us a double-edged cross to bear: on one hand, because we are rarely taken for our hard earned merits and qualifications when job hunting. For example, when employers take one look at me I get: “’Uh, how would you manage the stairs, finding the toilets – all delivered with an uncomfortable demeanour…

On the other hand, we’re told we’re scroungers if we’re not working in an environment which doesn’t give us half a chance and, supposedly the government is trying to get us into work?

So, what are they, the ideologists, doing to close the gap of discrimination for those of us who want to use our skills?

Nothing!

The DPAC (‘Dis-abled People Against the Cuts) movement is a short-sighted reactionary group – not offering solutions to the poverty trap most people with additional needs find themselves in – clinging onto the benefits system like a life raft.

In milking the victim culture, they don’t place us on an equal footing when the perfectionist bandits – standing outside nightclubs refusing to let us in under the guise of, health & safety or, we just couldn’t cope with a rough & ready mosh crowd.

By insisting to maintain the lowered status within society’s pecking order, those protesting against benefit cuts really should be protesting on why we are sentenced to a life absent of the same opportunities, most people simply take for granted.

Yes, the benefits we rely on help with added expenses: such as increased taxi fares, holistic therapies managing specific conditions or mobility equipment; (all of which should be secured) but being on state benefits is not an independent or dignified path and one which leaves us wide open to the shenanigans of the state.

Granted, there are those who cannot work due to their conditions, be it mental or physical, yet that should never be the thrust of what is perceived to be living “dignified lives?”

No, in my book of cross-cultural experience, dignity hinges on what I ‘can do’ and making it possible!

I want an empowering campaign which says: yes, I have limitations and additional employment/educational/support needs, but can still contribute to society in a meaningful way.

I want a campaign which says, I have to work harder, so deserve EQUAL PAY, OPPORTUNITIES promoting me as a social/sexual being. Not a campaign/culture of downtrodden, institutionalised oppression…

GET IT?

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/23/disability-campaigners-occupy-parliament-over-benefit-cuts