[tpmoney]

> - Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.

The flip side of this is that it allows / encourages others to see your disability as a mere "inconvenience" or something that should be able to be separated from you. I find at least for people I know with mental health disabilities they feel "person with X" tends to lead very quickly into "I know you have X but why can't you just be/do/deal with Y". In fact, I have a general theory (untested) that where someone with a disability falls on the "I am a person with X" vs "I am X" is probably directly proportional to how much X is a strong defining factor in their lives. I notice this particularly in ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders, where being on the "less support needs" side of the spectrum tends to be described as "I have ADHD / Autism" but being on the side of the spectrum that requires more suppoed "I am ADHD / Autistic" is more common. And for those I know who prefer the "I am X" format, part of that is because, paraphrased "this is a major part of my life that fundamentally alters how I live and interact with the world and I need people to understand that about me"

Obviously to a large degree this depends on your language having an adjective form in the first place e.g. we have yet to come up with "I am cancered", though in a related way we often. see "I am a cancer survivor" / "I am fighting cancer", but it's still relatively common even for bad cases to be "I have cancer".