Our entire society is not built for my body

We are all different, yet share the common reality that our functional abilities change throughout our lives. But is this reflected in how we meet and understand one another? And is it reflected in the way we design the built environment and our surroundings more broadly? Or do we, as a society, most often take as our point of departure a conception of the human being that upholds an idealised form of the human as the norm?

Caspar Eric is a writer and public debater who has cerebral palsy, which, among other things, causes him to limp. He made his debut with Gyldendal in 2014 and published his eighth poetry collection, Crip, in 2025.

In the film, he talks about what it has been like to grow up with a disability. He describes himself as a stubborn and hardworking person. Since he was very young, he has thought that he wanted to be someone.

“And that also has something to do with living with a disability. Having to prove yourself a lot. That fills a great deal of my personality. This sense that I have a right to be here in some way, or that it was good that I survived when I was born stillborn. That it was okay that it cost the tax money it did,” he says.

He also talks about how frustrating it is constantly to be pigeonholed and seen by others as one of “the disabled”, despite the fact that living with a disability is not a single life situation. About how the absence of a single, shared life situation makes it difficult to become a community or a collective “we”. About how part of the price of continually trying to overcome one’s own disability is precisely that it can be hard to come together in a “we”.

“The problem right now is that there is no one who sees us. You can become so good at being individual and at trying to overcome your own disability that it also kind of stops being a place you can speak from,” he argues.

What he understands by overcoming his disability, he elaborates on elsewhere, namely in the anthology I Am Looking for a New Way to Talk about Disability. Here, he describes how, as a disabled person, he was brought up to “manage on his own”, not to think about his disability, but to forget it, and how, in some situations, he was able to hide it. He also talks about the duality of wanting to be part of an activist community with other disabled people, while at the same time feeling a great deal of resistance towards it.

When asked in the film what he does in order to fit in, he replies: “Well, in a way, it’s everything I do.” But he does not think of the things he does to fit in as good or bad. Adjusting oneself to one’s surroundings is something all people do. The difference is simply that, for him, it is something he has to do an awful lot, all the time.

“Our entire society is not built for my body. And that’s why it collides with society all the time,” he observes.

The video is part of a series of 12 films in which we invite experts and prominent voices in society to share their reflections on how an inclusive view of humanity can help shape and transform our shared future. The films were produced in connection with Bevica Foundation’s 150th anniversary.