of those disabled people who met each other and found their tribe. It has never really been that way for me, even after getting past not wanting to be reminded and such.
(Maybe that's what holds us back. Some combination of sharing it the most outside the family...mostly, if you're not Deaf, that's how it goes. And reminding us of stuff we'd rather not think about.)
When I send e-mail, I'm all about the PS. A lot of times, this is different, because I'm looking for my Op-ed close-up in a way that probably only happens in movies anyway, but I think Ta-Nehisi Coates used to blog a lot.
I do feel for the kids who missed so much during the heat of the pandemic. I do wish, that when I missed things during my own youth(and I probably had hundreds of thousands of compatriots...if you're reading this, and you think this fits you, the world owes us all a hell of a good time and a moment in the spotlight during which the phrase "it really makes you think," is never used once.) that the response could have been more compassionate and less full of thoughts like:
"What did you expect?"
"You have to understand..."
"Be realistic..."
"People get uncomfortable..." or, for a multi-generational occasion "They're from a different era," accompanied by much helpless shrugging.(Maybe we could normalize apologizing when our Forebears should be impolite? Realizing of course that life isn't a Norman Lear show and that the person themselves will not appreciate a confrontation--that man really did skew my expectations, sometimes. But sometimes "I'm sorry. I love her and I love you, But sometimes she doesn't get it." might have been good.
Not only did none of this bullshit help when everybody "hung out without me", trying to live it out and extend this harshness-disguised-as-wisdom to other people has made a callus on my soul hurt. It makes it hard to be good to people when realism is the same as eating a shit sandwich.
Usually, even when your Bohemian Crip has had a tough week(getting dental work repaired while disabled is hardly listed as a mood elevator, even when you’re trying to do what your mom and Taylor Swift would do and “Shake It Off”) I find myself wishing there was more depth to the pain. Even though thinking “Dag, this is where I’m like everyone else?!, as well as dealing with your mouth’s sensitivity, in addition to your spirit’s might seem like more than enough, I still wish I were like Greta Thunberg and have a whole ailing planet to ache for—not that I don’t, but I don’t have her focus.
On one hand, I’d love to be able to say that the cries of pain from Gaza hurt
my heart so much that that is where the cloud comes from(and they’re one of the shapes) but, given the level of
conflict in the region, would that be signing an agreement to never be happy
again?) I usually like to make this journal lighter when I can, both because
that’s more fun and because half of America tends to imagine disabled people as
either always at the doctor or still left out from sixth grade softball tryouts.
It kind of seems like a goal to show that we enjoy things in between
limitations, even when I feel like
adding “that one time,” because it’s been a while and I’ve missed out a
lot. I’m not entirely comfortable
writing that, because I think we have often taken the concept of pride in our
identity the wrong way and given ourselves a new pressure to stubbornly insist that we wouldn’t change
a thing
. I can’t say that, not sure I ever will, but I can only write that from the vantage point of surfing one of a declining number of crimson waves(won’t miss that, exactly, whenever it wraps up, but it has provided clarity for my emotional writing from time to time, as well as a convenient hook for family members to decide I’m making a big deal over nothing, and, at the end of the week, everything will look good again. Maybe some of the Opera will go away, but that’s not the same.)
Sometimes I wish both things were true, even though I think that person would be kind of a joke in real life. Sometimes I even wish snap, pop psychology was right and I was maternal enough to get lifted by helping sticky-fingered kids make macaroni necklaces. But I think it’s another Never that makes me feel bad about menopause. I have had a lot of never since I was nine and my parents and I had what I now tend to think of as the “forever and ever, amen,” Talk about cerebral palsy. (It seemed better when I was nine than it does today, and, no we never really had another one.)
It's still hard to mourn a friend who was more passionate about our relationship than I was. Not to say I was unfair about it—it’s just that I’ve most often been on the other end of the divide, and it’s me, for God’s sake. If I was unfair about that, I was mainly questioning her taste, I think.
