Difference and Disability

So then, this brings up the question of 'what is a disability?'. I can't answer the question without drawing on my own life, my own experiences and knowledge of other people. There is, however, a standard answer which certainly forms a part of my larger, personal one: a disability can be inferred in an individual testing below a certain level on an IQ test, and by difficulty in an agreed-upon number of 'adaptive skills' such as feeding, cleaning, or clothing oneself, mobility, communication, social fluency, and the ability to get and retain a job.

In my more expansive definition, the consequences of a disability are another way to diagnose its presence. If we are alienated from others, that is proof we have a disability. One obvious thing that produces this estrangement from others is difference: a different body or a different brain, obviously, but just as much a different home culture or religion, different traditions, a different language, illiteracy, poverty, mental illness, scars from childhood, selfishness, insecurity, jealousy, fear. These are disabilities because they keep us from interacting with others as richly as we otherwise could and, by barring us from truly connecting with others, from reaching our own potential to be fully human.

Because some of them have only transactional or contingent value, the difference is that with some of these afflictions we have the choice of whether or not to show our brokenness, a privilege not granted to every person with every disability. We may still be as insecure about our scrawny arms as we were in seventh grade, but if we bulk them up, or even simply walk with a swagger or a sidearm, no one need ever know. We have the luxury of hiding a fear of rejection, for example, behind a supercilious or dismissive attitude, but that fear, however well hidden to others, still exists and thus precludes true intimacy with others.

So I just think the overwhelming majority of us are disabled in significant ways. The manner in which our frailty manifests itself may not preclude abundant, pleasant, superficial contact with others but, inasmuch as it means we cannot fully offer ourselves to others, and thus receive the entire richesse, the whole, the true self, of others in return, it is every bit as limiting as all those things conventionally labeled 'disabilities.'

And, rats, I still didn't say what it was I was trying to say for months on this. God bless blogs: there's always tomorrow. Someday it will, despite all my best efforts, say precisely what I mean it to say...