‘Shut Up, You Spastic!’
Three occasions all with one common link.
Fourteen years have passed since I left school, and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure exactly where that time has gone.
For the most part, I look back on my school days as being okay — in truth, they could have been a lot worse.
However, it doesn’t mean I went without experiences where I was either targeted, singled out or treated differently because of my disability. There are three occasions that come to mind and all have one very interesting link.
During my first few years in school around ages 4–7, I don’t remember experiencing anything too traumatic in how others my age interacted with me and my disability. Sure, I’d had kids ask ‘what’s wrong with your leg’, ‘why do you walk like that’ or ‘why do you have those things on your legs’ (referring to my DAFO braces) but at the time, those questions seemed purely inquisitive with no hint of judgment or negativity.
I can remember the first time I experienced something a little more sinister. I was hanging up my coat and bag on its hook and two boys from my year group were having a discussion next to me. I attempted to join in with them, which is when one of the boys turned around and said:
“Shut up, you spastic.”
I was nine years old.
I’d never heard that word before and I remember asking my classroom helper what it meant later that morning. She seemed a little taken aback at my question. I’m not sure whether she felt uncomfortable explaining it to me, or whether she was using this as some sort of learning opportunity, but I vividly remember us getting a dictionary from the bookshelf in the classroom and looking up the word together.
I don’t have a printed dictionary to hand, but the Google result gives the same as I recall:
adjective: spastic
1. Relating to or affected by muscle spasm.
2. OFFENSIVE•DATED a person with cerebral palsy.
I saw number 2 and thought, ‘oh, that’s what I have.’ She then went on to explain it wasn’t a nice word and that if anyone called me that, to let someone know. I didn’t tell on anyone that day; I just said I’d heard it somewhere.
I really hate that word. In years gone by, I’ve heard it commonly used by groups of non-disabled people in social situations. For example, I’ll be in a bar and someone on another table will spill a drink, loud cheers will irrupt from a nearby group followed by shouts of ‘you fucking spastic’. Makes me cringe every time.
I’m so glad social media was not the animal it is now whilst I was in school. I hate to think about some of the shit children must have to deal with on an almost never-ending basis with things continuing online long after the school gates have closed. Back when I was in high school, two things were taking off: they were MySpace & Bebo. Really showing my age here!
I never really got too involved in either, but I can remember being shown a photo on someone from school’s Bebo page. It was a photo of two people during a class, I happened to be in the background of this picture, had spotted the camera and had decided to pull a funny face in the background — if anything, I was photobombing before anyone knew what it even was — such a trendsetter!
The photo only had 2 comments on it, the first was from a guy in my year group. The comment simply said:
“What is that gimp doing?”
Now, what will surprise you is his comment wasn’t even what hurt most. It was the fact that the reply from someone I considered a good friend at that time wasn’t “don’t call him that” — it was simply, “no idea, lol”.
The crowning end to all teenagers' high school days is, of course, the prom. If I’m completely honest, my memories of that are that it was pretty crap and I wish I hadn’t bothered going for a number of reasons.
Firstly, all of the people I considered friends had either found themselves a date or had decided to go in groups that I was excluded from. There was no way any girl was going to want to be seen with the disabled boy as their date and there was no way I was asking any of them out of the crippling fear of embarrassment from the certain rejection I would receive.
Whilst the majority of my peers arrived in fancy cars and limousines, I got my dad to drop me off around the corner and I walked in pretty much unnoticed.
The second reason related to the hotly anticipated ‘After-Party’. I remember on the final day of school, the student who had said he would host an after-party for the prom came in with a huge plastic box full of envelopes: enough, it appeared, for everyone in our year group. The envelopes contained the invitations to the big party he was holding.
I didn’t get an envelope.
When a friend of mine asked him ‘why isn’t James invited to the party?’ The response he got was:
“I was worried about him falling over”
Let us unpack that for a second, shall we?
The party was going to be full of 16-year-olds illegally drinking in his parents’ back garden. When anyone (disabled or not) gets drunk, their risk of falling over tends to increase!
I’m not sure whether it was that his parents were worried that if the kid with cerebral palsy fell on their property I’d instantly sue them. They needn’t of worried: school doesn’t teach you anything useful like the importance of a good credit score later in life or the process of filing a lawsuit against someone. What I could have done is told them which shapes from a selection of triangles were Pythagoras, which is something I have never done again since my GCSE maths exam in 2007.
So whilst my classmates all headed to this guy’s house to drink out the end of school in style, I headed to my mum’s car and back to my own home. A somewhat sour end to my school days.
Now I told you that all of these stories are linked.
The link is that in the fourteen years that have passed from when I left school, I have since bumped into these three individuals during our lives as adults in social situations, be it at a wedding reception, in the middle of a shopping centre, or in a restaurant or bar. The nine-year-old kid who called me a spastic, the classmate who referred to me online as a gimp and the guy who excluded me from the party all greeted me with lines such as ‘Hey James! So great to see you, how you been!?’
Seemingly, it would appear they were completely unaware of the effect their actions earlier in our lives had on me.
