I have a C5 spinal cord injury. 84% of my body doesn't move or feel the way it used to. I use a wheelchair. By any medical definition, I have a significant impairment.
For a long time after the injury, "disability" was just the word people reached for, including me. It took a while before I noticed something odd sitting inside it.
Look closely at "disability" and you'll see it's built the same way as "dishonest" and "disloyal." The prefix "dis-" doesn't modify a quality, it reverses it. It turns loyalty into betrayal, honesty into deceit, ability into its opposite. We don't usually notice it in "disability" because we've stopped hearing the word as a sentence. But it is one: dis-ability. Not-able.
That's not a claim that the word is wrong, or that anyone who uses it — or identifies with it, with real pride — has got something wrong. Plenty of people have built a strong, positive identity around exactly this word, and that's not what I'm questioning here. What I am curious about is the history sitting quietly underneath it: where the deficit and dependency associations actually came from, and what it's worth noticing once you see it.
What the prefix can quietly do
Say "disability" enough times about a group of people and a few things can happen, whether anyone intends them or not:
It can nudge toward assuming incompetence before anything else is known — the word arriving first, the person second.
It can lean into a story of dependency, framing something ordinary — everyone depends on other people for something — as a permanent, defining condition rather than a normal feature of being human.
It can imply a line that isn't really there: THE disabled, THE non-disabled, as if humanity sorts cleanly into two boxes. What's actually true is that ability varies, for everyone, across a life and sometimes across a single day.
Where I think the problem is actually located
Here's the question that's mattered most to me: where is the problem located?
The medical model says: in the person. The social model — the one I find more true to my own experience — says: in society's attitudes, values, and structures. New Zealand's own Disability Strategy puts it plainly:
I have an impairment. That's a fact about my body — value-neutral, no story attached. For me, whether I experience disability depends a lot on what's built around me. That's my own way of holding the two words apart — not a rule I'm asking anyone else to adopt.
How I've come to use the word
I still think "disabled" does one job honestly: as a verb, describing an experience. "I was disabled by the stairs." Used that way, the word names an action, done by an environment, to a person. I find that useful.
Where I personally reach for "impairment" instead is when I'm talking about the condition itself — my own body, my own story — not because "disability" is incorrect, but because it's the word that fits how I've come to think about my own experience.
Why I'm sharing this at all
None of this is an argument that "person with a disability," "disabled person," or simply "disability," are the wrong words for anyone else to use about themselves. If you carry pride in that word, this isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at whoever — like me, for a long time — has never had reason to look at where the word's baggage actually came from.
Noticing costs nothing. It doesn't need funding, or policy, or anyone's permission. And it isn't only symbolic — how we see people shapes what we expect of them, and what we expect of them shapes what they get offered. That's the whole reason I think it's worth a second look.