Sort of a mixed message this week as I signed up for a
workshop on “Illness in Fiction” in a few weeks (I’m still debating whether to
get my money back, actually) but also a bit somber that I couldn’t share a meme
that said “Our Disabled Lives Aren’t Sad.”
Because sometimes mine is, even though I wish it weren’t.
Sometimes, it seems
sadder than other peoples’ but maybe not as much as when I was younger and
almost thought abled people doing abled things was some kind of magic I was
feeling cut off from.
(Spoiler alert:
Sometimes the pretty girls had problems I couldn’t guess at by looking. Life is not easy for anyone, all the time.) Maybe if it said “Our Disabled Lives Aren’t
ONLY Sad” I could participate a bit more—maybe I’m feeling like a uniter for
getting a chance to annoy both the ableists and the hardcore disability-pride
faction that are so defiant about never wanting to change a thing, being part
of nature’s vast tapestry, blah, blah blah.
Like that’s such an answer when you get your heart crushed because of
some thing that’s not your fault, one more way. Or when it feels like the
answer for every one of your questions is “No”.
Or when you’re fourteen or so hearing that for the first time and you
just wish Jeff liked you back and thinking “Fuck nature” is the first time it
really wasn’t, like, the horrible F-word in your head, even if you don’t say it
out loud for a few more years because you bought the “poverty of expression”
hype far longer than any rational human should have, even after watching Eddie
Murphy fucking paint with maledicta.
(Okay, it helped a little, the first few times, to know that
other people shared some of these struggles, too, but it’s getting harder to
stay excited about that in the absence of true solutions, much less that whole
tween thing where you look at somebody in the next grade and buy a backpack
that looks like hers because you can’t actually be her.)
Definitely not seeing many—can I be completely corny, and
call them “roll models”—anymore, and I’m not being one either, trying to talk
some…kind of anonymous macro into understanding why some disabled sadness makes
sense, sometimes. Not being able to move around, just on its face, sucks hard
sometimes. There are places I will never be, and, probably, people I haven’t
met because this is true. Maybe one of
them was supposed to be my lobster, too.(Though I try to think otherwise,
because what can I do about it?) And, yeah, it’s empowering to say “Maybe in a
fully-accessible society…” but I’ve never seen one, and probably? Neither have you. So you might as well call
and get the weather report from Narnia while you are at it—not sure why I
picked that—got two chapters into one of those books before I got bored, but maybe
my friend Jacqueline would have liked that shoutout.
I get caught, as I often do, between “A Better World Is Possible”(this would be
a lot less sad if societies would do better by us and stop making us
sing for our suppers so much) and the more personal terrain of “Don’t Tell Me
What Kind of Day To Have”—I think many Americans are still scared of our bad
feelings and admitting that every piece of #persistence doesn’t lead to
clear-cut success.
I’m not saying it’s great to be sad—I certainly feel that I’ve
done my time and several other peoples’ on that front lately, but it is part of
the deal of being a real human being that can, in theory, feel All The Things.
So, if you are, try to accept yourself. Hope for a better
day, and stop worrying about some hypothetical abled eye, looking for
bumper-sticker wisdom.
