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...

Institutions vs. Institutionalized Strengthiness

I got a new job, which I am very excited about. It is as Job Coach for people with disabilities, for a great, passionate, very cool organization, whose values mesh up with mine very well. I had applied for a similar position with a different organization previously - and, I don't know, something, or, truly, a few somethings just weren't right as I went through parts of the interview process. And neither my passion nor my political or intellectual position on issues related to the job mattered at that place: it was to be a Job and nothing more. After having worked in many, many restaurants and seen the kind of ardor, dedication, and self-sacrifice routinely demanded of even those on the lowest rungs of the kitchen ladder, it was quite disturbing to find that, in a position where human psyches and human hearts would be affected as much by my approach as by my execution of the position, neither actually mattered. I still knew that I would rock at the job and be a great asset for the individuals I would support if hired, so I waited to see if I was called to the final level of interviews. But I wasn't, and I felt it was all to the best.

So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.

The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.

Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.

But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.

My Heel Broke in a Traffic Jam en Route to the DMV -- so I Killed Myself.

Sorry, children, about the long pause. I tried a couple times, but it was difficult to think of utterly content-free things to write. (I do realize I come close, very close, at times, but it is a talent that cannot be fully harnessed; it comes when it wills.) And that wouldn't have been the solution, anyway: people who wish to can read volumes from the selection of a semicolon over a period. It doesn't mean they are correct in doing so; nor, however, does this latter truth dissuade them from undertaking the exercise for their own reasons. Despite my silence in this venue, however, I remain very much alive, not to mention sentient and ambulatory. And having rather a good time of it over the holidays, circumscribed culinary choices notwithstanding.

'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.' Much Ado, II, 1

That has nothing to do with it, though, actually. This does:

A former boyfriend succeeded in making me partially insane and fully uncomfortable by noting, taking to heart, and doing some long-range, possibly trigonometric, extrapolating from, aspects of this blog that in an ideal world would escape every reader's attention. I then wrote the Reader's Guide in hopes of making my intentions for this encyclopedic rant clear as an unmuddied lake.

But allow me to backtrack.

Since the demise of this relationship, I have had little (very little) contact with this person. He writes the occasional ingratiating, or condescending, or cloyingly/disturbingly reminiscent email, and I respond politely yet tersely. I answer his questions (that's the polite bit), but I answer them in as brief a manner as possible (so as not to engage him further). I strive to be ladylike, in other words, whilst neither providing details, meeting his nostalgia with some of my (depleted, frankly) own in return, nor asking him any questions. The letters end with 'Hope you are well,' which I should think would be read as something quite distinct from 'Tell me all about your work,' or 'Who are you dating?' or 'What's new with you?'

But the State of Things being what it is.

Politeness, it seems, can, in its rarity, be mistaken for Friendliness or, perhaps, as it seems in this case, a Desperate Plea for Help. A cri du coeur the nature of which I am still at a loss to discern. Had I wished for reengagement with this party I assuredly would have supplemented his proffered reminiscences with a few breathless sighs of 'Ah, yes, those were indeed the salad days' of my own and some rose-hued specifics to make my argument. But I would not likely have answered his (misty, watercolored) Memories with silence.

But One Cannot Wear Kid Gloves in the Ring.

And although my amateur pugilist days are well behind me, a friend convinced me that however little I was saying I was clearly saying it wrong, even if 'saying it wrong' meant I was merely saying it politely. And that this drain on my psyche was draining my blog, and that that was wrong.

And while I agree, I thought I had sounded rather more austere than previously in my last return email. On the other hand, I still couldn't think of things to write, other than merely reprinting the Gettysburg Address or the Creation Story a few times -- things of my own, that is, into which nothing at all could be read that wasn't solely of a cheery and uplifting nature. Nothing, in other words, to indicate that we live in a world in which we sometimes stub our toes, eat mediocre food, get stuck in traffic, wake up too late, wake up too early -- or kill our cousins, or kill our brothers, now that I come to reconsider my arbitrary choices above.

Moreover, I couldn't even figure out when I was supposed to 'publish' these cheery entries, as a recent missive from this individual indicated that he was paying close heed to the (again, arbitrary, but no matter) timestamp and reckoning from it the course of my days. (And not in the most flattering of lights, I assure you, but more of the sort of thing about which scores of country singers have had much to say through the decades. Except for the latenight online Scrabble dig, which, to my knowledge, has yet to feature in the lyrics even of Dwight Yoakum, literate, postmodern, and good with words though he may be.)

'Certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions.' As You Like It, IV, 1

So I thought about it a bit but remained stuck. I would like this blog to be a way to keep in touch with people, to entertain them a bit, and to be a place where I can, if I wish, vent my spleen. I like puppydogs and minigoats. Tremendously, in fact, and puffy clouds, and saltwater taffy, and veiled chameleons, and broderie anglaise, and maribou slippers, and birdsong in the summer in a field under the sun amongst frolicking animals and wildflowers by a waterfall, too. I like painting my nails, and going to the ballet, and eating Drumsticks, and making perfumes. But I also get stuck in traffic, I also get lost in parking garages, I abhor going to the DMV, I put off the Post Office and UPS for as many months as I can, and I sometimes sit around reading and writing by myself and letting my nail polish dry. And why any of it, or the writing of it, or the patent exaggeration of my angst surrounding it should cause someone to pity me eludes me.

So I thought about it a bit more, but just a bit, because short on the heels of the above conversation came the New Year's Wishes missive. And I couldn't take it. Relative to the others it was, frankly, innocuous, save for a rhetorical device I can't be bothered to go into here. But it was enough, if due only to the cumulative effect of the whole series and of my frustrated, impuissant, polite and indirect efforts to discourage further contact.

Thus was I impolite in my response. And thus one hopes was he disabused of the misguided impression that we are, owing to the persistence of the aforementioned watercolored memories, Friends. It's a shame, though, that it had to come to that; except maybe for Kant, reading is only as hard as you make it.