You know that you are old when your doctor starts using the phrase, “For someone of your age …” That happened to me for the first time when I was 40. At age 65, it now happens regularly. It seems that I am required to lower my expectations for my body a little bit each year. But even though my joints ache, I can’t jump anymore, my hearing is impaired, my short-term memory is spotty, I take medication for depression, and I need bright light to see clearly, I consider myself very healthy and certainly not disabled. Why is that?

​“Disabled” and “disability” are tricky words. The formal definition is “any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or interact with the world around them. These conditions, or impairments, may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or a combination of multiple factors.” (I recommend reading the extensive Wikipedia article on disability where I found this definition.)

Under this or almost any other definition, I am disabled. Why don’t I ever think of myself in this way?  Almost without exception, we all resist getting hearing aids, using a cane or a walker, or taking medicine for chronic conditions. Again, why?

I believe that older adults (including myself) resist using equipment that marks us as disabled, and especially resist the label “disabled” because we unconsciously think less of “those” people, and we do not want to join that group. And we certainly don’t want to be treated as “special!”

News flash! Whether disabilities are defined as medical, social or functional [look up those definitions], those of us who are aging are experiencing decreases in our abilities and in the expectations of those around us. We are “disabled,” and we don’t like it one little bit.

Rather than denial, maybe it would be healthy to reflect on our own tendency to distance ourselves from people who are not like us, and to consider them somehow “less than.”

Can we admit that we are disabled? To do otherwise is to say to people with more identifiable disabilities, “I don’t want to be in your group. Your group is not OK.”

I hope we can do better than that. I hope that our admission of our disabilities will open the door to understanding barriers that people with disabilities face, and that we can join them in breaking down those barriers.