Disability is not a defect – no one asks to be disabled

DISABILITY arrives uninvited.

- PREVIN VEDAN

Sometimes it comes with a birth. Sometimes with a diagnosis. Sometimes, as in my case, it comes violently, in a flash of steel, a spasm of pain and a slow, quiet aftermath that rewrites your life.

I was 30 years old when I was stabbed in my right hand during a robbery — the hand I used to write, sign court documents, to hand over title deeds, shake hands and, ironically, protect others.

That single act of violence left me with a permanent disability and forced me to enter a world I had never truly seen before, the world of the disabled.

And let me tell you, South Africa is not kind to disabled people.

Recovery was not just medical. It was existential. Multiple surgeries later, I found myself unable to hold a fork or press a button at a boom gate. I had to learn how to write again.

But the hardest thing was not the pain, it was the stares. The long silences. The assumptions. The way people treat you as less.

At airports, I would lean awkwardly to reach the intercom with my left hand while drivers behind me hooted impatiently.

They could not see my gold glove or my scar tissue. They only saw delay. And I, like many disabled people, would just apologise, because explaining takes time and society does not give us that.

Sometimes I struggle to reach into my right pocket. People watch. They think I am hiding something. That I am slow. Suspicious. Or faking it.

That is what disability often feels like, constantly justifying your presence in a world not built for you.

There is a profound difference between being born disabled and becoming disabled. That is not to rank pain, it is to describe the experience.