Sometimes Disability Life Is A Little Sad....

 

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.