via wheelchair dancer in response to (re)thinking walking series.

I’m going to be thinking long about WD’s entire post, there was so much there to think about–but in particular this part:

As it features in these posts, disability is identified and identifiable in what I have come to call the “boundedness” of the pain and difficulty walking. It is intricately but immovably connected to the experience of difficulty and the “can’t” that comes with body fragility. I’d like to make an argument by analogy. If you’ve followed me thus far in shifting the critical and interpretive weight from bodily walking to a body moving, from foot planting/stumping to rolling as experiences and philosophies of walking, can you follow me also in gathering together the many disability studies/disability rights cultural, social, political and still embodied understandings of disability as being more than the failure of the body? How can we apply these ideas to this act, this walking, that so many of our fellow people and our social and political institutions use as a dividing line between disableds and nons?

I’ve got SO many ideas floating around in my head–I get that way when I get all excited about thinking in a new way!

But I wanted to point out this paragraph in particular because I think for me, it is a “next step,” so to speak. For me, it’s been SO important to think about, contemplate, really understand and admit to the pain of movement….because culturally I’ve been trained to ignore it for so long.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how I asked W* to come home early from work one day so that I could make my weekly acupuncture appointment. The acupuncture appointments are my way of centering my health and have become a weekly expectation for me, like brushing my teeth.

W* gave me a bit of flak for my request. He can rearrange his schedule and often does to make school functions and the such–but he was being a bit stubborn about rearranging things for acupuncture.

I didn’t back down though. And I told my friend that the fact that I didn’t back down was a huge deal for me. How many times had I sacrificed my health because “work is more important”? How many times?

Since I was a kid–a teeny kid. Work was more important than me *period*. The intervention I was making with W* was so important to me because it was the first time in my life that I said “I am in pain, and nothing else is more important than me at this moment!”

It was a moment that was almost stunning to me. Because as I said to my friend–I wouldn’t for a freaking minute *ever* tell my children that they had to wait to go to a doctor when they felt like crap. And knowing that, I can only imagine the life, the poverty, the situation of rock/hard place that my parents must have been in to say that over and over again to their own children. It wasn’t that they said, no, you aren’t going to go to a doctor. It was more the “suck it up, we all feel like shit, deal with it” sort of thing.

And that mentality, not just my parents, but my entire community’s, has followed me, only gotten stronger, since I’ve gotten older. Don’t go to the hospital when you’re having an asthma attack because you might lose your job! That cough doesn’t really mean anything–you can still get up and go to work everyday so it’s not so bad! Oh, you’ve been unable to get off the couch for three months? It’s because you’re lazy and your will power isn’t strong enough! GET UP!

A coping tactic of suck it up and deal with it gets twisted so easily into an abusive tirade meant to hurt.

So for me, coming out from under the stifling abusive pressure of “SHUT THE FUCK UP” is and remains so important to me. BUT–now that I have committed to making a space to admit pain into my life–to stop denying it–I ALSO am more than ready to, as WD invites, “follow me also in gathering together the many disability studies/disability rights cultural, social, political and still embodied understandings of disability as being more than the failure of the body?”
I am SO ready. Beyond ready. (and on an interesting side note, it was WD who first challenged me to contemplate why so many people of color [ME] refuse to name our experience with disability as “disabled”) Not sure WTF to do or how to do it. But I am SO excited to see the road stretched out in front of me.