I am very sad to have just heard that the disability campaigner Lisa Egan, known to many online as Lisybabe, has passed away.
The early days of Twitter and the middle days of Facebook were the early days of online disability campaigning. Lisa and I were connected on both platforms for over 10 years. Although I never met her in person, I learnt a lot about her online.
She studied Film and TV, loved books and cats. We had much in common.
She was a team member at group blog Where’s The Benefit. Same Differencee once cross posted her description of a phone call from the job centre.
She ran her personal blog for many years. It is on the Same Difference blogroll and will forever stay there.
When I was reading the many posts written in tribute to Lisa I came across this thanks to Liz Carr:
I am so so sad – and gutted – to hear that Lisa has died.
I know she sometimes felt that no one cared and that she would die without anyone noticing. And that makes it even sadder to see all the people, so many from online communities internationally who knew Lisa, for whom her presence, her views, her politics, her way with words helped change them and find their place in the world as disabled people. I don’t think she had any idea how important she was and is to so many.
Many of us will know her as Lisybabe from the many and various online words she wrote over the years. I wanted to read some of them yesterday after I learnt of her death so I found her blog site: https://lisybabe.blogspot.com/ and I just wanted to share with you some of her words from a piece she wrote in December 2014 after two disabled friends Tracey Byrne and Stella Young had died. She talks about the way that disabled people, specifically people with her impairment, are written about when they die. In response to that, she leaves some very Lisa advice for when she dies:
“I’m not famous, I’m not popular, I’m just benefit scrounging scum. I won’t be remembered by former Prime Ministers, news outlets won’t write articles about me. I’ll be lucky if more than 5 people show up to my funeral and 3 people write blog posts about me.
But I feel I need to make the following quite clear:
No snowflakes either. I’m not small and delicate. I weigh 75kg: You would not want a snowflake my size landing on you. I’d crush you and the imprint left in the snow after I’d squished you would not look like the traditional snow angel.
No bullshit clickbait fetishising my deformed bones. My innards are my innards. Porn is about seeing the normally unseeable, like getting a good view up someone’s cunt. When I was doing my MA in Cult TV I read CSI described as “the porn of death” because with the autopsies, and “the CSI shot” where you get to see a bullet smashing it’s way through someone’s chest, that’s about seeing the normally unseeable too. This kind of article is basically impairment porn: Where you get a have a bloody good look at all someone’s unusual bits, both inside and out.
Do not use the word “RIP” in reference to me. Seriously. If you care that I’m gone you can either type the three whole words “rest in peace” or just not bother.
Can someone please play Raise Your Glass by P!nk at my funeral. I may be wrong, but it’s in all the right ways.
If someone does write that kind of impairment gawp fodder about me, please direct them to this post. These next 5 words are for them:
Fuck you, you creepy arsehole.”
Lisa, I hope you now know how much has been written about you online and how much sadness has been expressed in it. Thank you for your support of Same Difference and your online friendship. Rest in Peace.
Same Difference 