As a child, I was always gifted different kinds of Barbies and colours (I had 16 Barbies at a time.) While I loved colouring and spending time with the dolls as a kid, these gifts lost their importance quickly.
No, it wasn’t the realisation that these gifts were gendered, I was too young to fathom that sentence. I was 6 when I told my parents I didn’t like these gifts, I didn’t know what it was then but something did not add up. Maybe the dolls didn’t look like me and that exacerbated the differences between how the dolls looked vs how I looked as a kid. (None of them wore braces or big shoes and I didn’t understand why I had to at that time).
But those dolls were not the gifts I was looking for.
When I think back now, I know what I was looking for- I was looking for a world without staircases. I was looking for a world with ramps that I could run across on crutches to my classroom, washroom or even café.
If we just think about it I wonder if a ‘ramped’ world would be a better place to be in – it changes lives of people with disabilities and doesn’t take anything away from those without. I was also looking for people who spoke to me about movies and books before the clichéd- ''What, Why and how did this happen to you?''
