Disability II

“The first thing you do is to forget that I'm black. 


Second, you must never forget that I'm black.”

                                                     — Pat Parker

I live within the same contradiction this black person is describing. Only, I am disabled. I don’t have dark skin, but I have other identifying and obscuring characteristics. It takes some capacity to see paradoxically to really grasp the complex and often contradictory world of a minority person. They, like me, are defined and not defined, by their bodily situation. It is hard, at any given moment, to know how best to treat us. The moment, like our being, is ripe with contradictions. That is why it is wise not to forget our wholeness.

Paradoxical awareness is a necessity. It includes the opposites, contradictions, — the wholeness that includes complexity. Sympathy for the broken, like me, or the visible minority, like the quoted one, starts not with feeling sorry for us, but with an internal acknowledgement of the genius of Life. It has wrought a living contradiction.

This is especially important because each of us is headed in that direction. As we become ourselves, then inevitability sets in, and we age, becoming unique and edging further into minority life. The eccentricities of age are our uniqueness. They depend upon others being complex enough to see, and honor what Life is creating.

The prejudice of agism, is on the same continuum as our on-going difficulty with bodily vulnerability. The loss of functioning that galvanizes such fear around disability is the same as the inevitable losses of functioning that come with aging. A failure to see accurately now, abets the failure to be seen clearly in the long run. Agism, and the prejudices around disability, are part of the same blindness.

It is hard to get this truth.  To really grasp it takes the development of a kind of paradoxical awareness. That is why I keep drawing attention to my own state. Not because my situation is so difficult, but because it is likely to be other’s situations in time. Perhaps yours. There is an inevitable switchback that looms ahead.

There is an image that haunts me. It is a good image, but I am haunted by it because I’m not sure I can live up to it. Once, long ago, I heard someone talking about the elders of his people. Elders amongst his people were capable of laying their gifts down on the ground just outside the village. There, they waited and watched to see what the villagers took. The elders were capable of leaving their gifts for the villagers without attachment to any particular reception. The villagers were free to take what they wanted. 

This issue, being disabled, and knowing that my treatment is equivalent to the treatment my community is going to receive, is like an elder’s gift. I’m having trouble just laying it down, and being unattached about my community picking it up. The difficulty is in me. I know it. I can see that people must be, and are, free to do with this awareness as they will. Some might see and value it, most will not. That’s got to be all right with me. There is no gift, if I am attached. There is no freedom, if I am insistent. I know it.

I don’t know if joy or grief is in order here. Letting go seems like the most beneficial thing I can do. But letting go means acknowledging the freedom of others, which includes acknowledging the possibility that certain kinds of suffering will go on. Freedom endures. Prejudice endures. Can I endure knowing that I have to accept this? That particular combination is more than I imagine I can bear. Being an elder, not in years, but in these difficult matters, isn’t easy.

I have this crazy notion, probably its profoundly narcisstic, that being a physical wreck, like I am, is of some use to my larger community. I’m crazy enough to think that this connection (see above) might be it, but bodying it forth asks so much of me, that it is melting down my passionate desire to be in service to others in the way I want to be. I am confronted by something large, inscrutable, and totally unbending. What is, is a product of our freedom, and it isn’t. Reality limps like a good cripple disabled/enabled by our freedom, and our unfree choices.

The warning I want to broadcast is only of use to some, most notably me. Prejudice evidently has its uses. I want to reduce it, to limit the hurt and weight of negative expectations, but that is really up to Mystery. All I can do is accept that my efforts are of necessity limited, they may serve the part of me that must discharge the feelings that come with awareness of harm, but change is above my existential grade-level.

I am learning. It is always the hard way. I am both grateful and chagrined about my clumsy learning process. Still, I am more accepting. I’m slowly letting go of the reigns —my illusion of control — and enjoying the wild ride of no hope.