There's a word in the title that most people overlook: "becoming." Not "being disabled" — that's a state. "Becoming disabled" — that's a process. And the distinction is everything. Disability in our culture is usually framed as something that happens to you — an event, an accident, a diagnosis, a loss. But what this docuseries review captures is something more nuanced: disability is also a transformation. An identity that's built, not just received. Part 1 of this three-part introductory series begins the exploration of what it means to move from one way of being in the world to a fundamentally different one — and why the frameworks we use to understand that process matter more than we think.
The Medical Model: Disability as Deficit
The default framework for most people — including many disabled people, especially in the early stages — is the medical model. In this view, disability is a problem located in the individual body. Your legs don't work. Your brain processes differently. Your senses are impaired. The solution is to fix the body — through medicine, therapy, technology — and to the extent the body can't be fixed, the disability remains a deficit to be managed. As the APA notes in its overview of disability models, the medical model "views disabilities of all sorts as abnormalities" located in the individual.
This model isn't wrong in the sense that bodies do have impairments, and medicine can help. But it's incomplete in a way that causes real harm. If disability is purely a medical issue, then the social environment — the stairs, the websites, the attitudes, the expectations — becomes invisible. The problem is always you, not the world. And that framing shapes everything: how disabled people see themselves, how institutions respond to them, and what "solutions" get prioritized.
The Social Model: Disability as Barrier
The social model of disability, developed by disabled activists in the 1970s and 80s, flips the frame. As the Disability Nottinghamshire resource explains, "Disabled people developed the social model of disability because the traditional medical model did not explain their personal experience of disability." In the social model, the impairment is real — but disability is what happens when an impaired person encounters a world designed without them in mind. A wheelchair user isn't disabled by their legs. They're disabled by stairs. A deaf person isn't disabled by their ears. They're disabled by a society that conducts everything in speech.
This reframing isn't just philosophical — it changes what gets done. If the problem is the body, you pour resources into cures. If the problem is the environment, you pour resources into accessibility, accommodations, and systemic change. The social model doesn't deny that impairments are real. It separates impairment (a biological fact) from disability (a social consequence). And that separation is politically and psychologically powerful: it moves the "problem" off the individual and onto the structures that exclude them.
The Gap Between Models
But neither model fully captures the experience of becoming disabled, which is what this docuseries is about. The medical model says: your body is broken, and we'll try to fix it. The social model says: society is broken, and we'll try to fix it. But neither addresses the lived process of moving from one identity to another — the grief, the disorientation, the reconstruction of self, the discovery of community, the unexpected moments of clarity that come from experiencing the world through a different lens.
As research on the lived experience of disability notes, disability identity involves not just navigating barriers but "critiquing current systems" and finding new ways of being that neither the medical nor the social model fully anticipated. Becoming disabled means becoming someone you didn't plan to be — and discovering that this person has a perspective on the world that the previous version couldn't have accessed. Not a gift, not a curse. A transformation.
Why "Becoming" Matters
The word "becoming" in the title is doing important work. It rejects the idea that disability is a static state you're thrust into. Instead, it frames disability as an ongoing process of identity formation — one that involves loss, but also discovery. New limitations, but also new perspectives. New barriers, but also new communities. The process isn't linear, and it isn't the same for everyone. But it's always more complex than the binary of "able-bodied vs. disabled" allows.
Part 1 of this series sets up the framework — the models, the tensions, the questions. And as this reaction captures, the most important question isn't "what happened to you?" but "who are you becoming?" The answer isn't determined by the impairment. It's shaped by the person, the community, the environment, and — crucially — the framework you use to make sense of it all. The medical model tells you what you lost. The social model tells you what's wrong with the world. But the experience of becoming disabled tells you something neither model can: who you are when the identity you had is no longer available, and what's possible in the space that opens up when it falls away.
Go love somebody that you don't like. I love y'all. 🙏