All of those people trying so hard to help me…All of them hoping for me to …do well, all wanting to be kind and useful, all feeling how important helping me was. Yet never did anyone of them ask me what it was like for me. They never asked me what I wanted for myself. They never asked me if I wanted their help…I do not feel entirely grateful. I feel, instead, a remote anger stored beneath my coping pattern of complacent understanding. People do the best they can to help in meaningful ways, I know. I just wish all the people with disabilities would say to their helpers: “Before you do anything else, just listen to me.”
Saxton, Marsha
“The Something That Happened Before I Was Born.”
In Ordinary Moments—The Disabled Experience. Syracuse: Human Policy Press
(1985)