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A horror of pity
Written by Claire on Monday, January 1, 2007
I’ve been toying with the idea of telling my Mom I’m transabled. Before, I have said that I’d never tell her, that she’ll never know in this lifetime.
And then, as this strange journey that is transability progresses, I find myself very much alone. I have told my husband, but that hasn’t gone well at all. He takes it personally, is unable to see my point of view, thinks it selfish of me to wish this on myself when my family needs me. I see this point, but I see more than that. I see that my family needs me to be mentally healthy more than they need me to be able to walk. Sometimes my mom can be pretty understanding about things, especially when it comes to mental illness and depression. I need someone to talk to. Mothers always love us no matter what. And I need an ally in my corner. If my husband can’t accept or support my pretending as a way to deal with these feelings, perhaps she can. So I’ve considered telling her.
And then today she reminded me why I never will. We were talking about a family member who has had more than her fair share of hardships and my mother shook her head, filled with pity for this person and her disabled children. It was that kind of pity that we all shun, when it’s directed at us, and it made me shudder in horror. I’ve felt it before, with my hearing loss. I’ve felt the full force of it from her. How she reminds me about certain things I must do in order to manage my hearing loss, as if I didn’t manage it daily when we aren’t on vacation together and I live thousands of miles away from her. How she tries to refer to my hearing loss using euphemisms or vague statements like “you don’t want something to happen” instead of just using the phrase HEARING LOSS or the word DEAFNESS or whatever. How she looks at me with deep sadness etched into her face as I struggle to understand something that I just can’t quite catch. I want to scream, just say it again louder, don’t get all maudlin on me!! Rather than focusing on the conversation and doing what needs to be done to communicate, attention is turned frequently to the hearing loss, which makes me just not to talk with her at all.
I loathe pity.
I refuse to pity anyone. I don’t pity my disabled friends. I don’t pity my disabled relatives. I don’t pity those who have lived a “hard life”. In one way, I was lucky in the way I was raised. I was raised to see disability as just another facet of the human condition; you’re in a wheelchair, she’s mentally retarded, I’m fat and have acne and hearing loss, let’s move on. It’s just no big deal. Sure, sometimes it’s difficult, but that’s mostly when other people make an issue of it or the world refuses to accommodate our differences. Without making light of the challenges we all face, pity is not something that is constructive or helpful in getting anyone where they need to be. It’s degrading. Pity sees us as less than we are. We become nothing more than a tragedy, something to be avoided at all costs.
In hearing this pity drip from my mother’s voice I realized that were I to tell her about BIID and being transabled, that pity would once again be directed full force at me. Her daughter, fighting a mental illness which may “confine” her to a wheelchair by her own choosing either by pretending or worse, self-injury. The tragedy of mental illness. The tragedy of disability. The last thing in the world any of us need is more pity. So because my mother, with all her good intentions, cannot see disability as anything more than sheer tragedy, she will never know what her daughter is going through. It’s too bad, because she probably would like to be there for me, helping me through a hard time.
And having said that I wonder what would happen were I to achieve my desired disability or decide to take the plunge to assume a fictitious disability and use the wheelchair full time. More pity from my mother and, doubtless, others. But in this case, I would take it, in order to get where I’m going. Having my mom “in my corner” talking about transability isn’t worth putting up with her pity. But achieving full-time wheelchair use would be worth it. I’d hate the pity, but I’d put up with it, in order to get what I need.
The desire of a transabled person to be disabled isn’t about getting pity, or attention, or being helpless. If anyone doubts that, then spend three days on your own in a wheelchair in public and you’ll find out that as a wheelchair user, you either get less attention by becoming invisible, or you get the kind of attention you don’t want.
I don’t want pity for being transabled. I wouldn’t want pity for being disabled. In either case, I just need the freedom to do what I need to do, in the manner I decide is the best way for me to do it. And for the world, including my mother, to accept my right to that freedom.
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3 Comments
2 On 15 January, 2007, rorschach said:
To get a bit nitpicky, I think you’re giving pity a bit of a bad rap. I understand your view that pity can be damaging, and I agree that in too great a quantity it can. It seems as if society has corralled the disabled into a few arenas in which they may be appreciated pity is definitely one of them.
However; pity in itself is rather positive. To begin with it is, as compared to the wide range of emotional responses available, take an extreme like hatred for example, quite preferable. Pity, despite its sorrowful elements also includes an element of sympathy. I see a lot of people in the world mistreating one another often without reason; and so it is with this contrast that I have found it much easier to swallow the somewhat bitter pill of pity. To borrow and modify a line from Bob Dylan, in this world of steel eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm, pity is shelter from the storm.
I think a lot of the “pitifying”, if you’ll let me create that word, of the disabled is due to the effect groups such as Hallmark have had (The Hallmark Effect). It has been found that sap sells, and because of this the disabled have been exploited. There exists a class of people who will respond quite strongly to a variety of emotionally products, such as tear jerkers, feel goods etc. Due to this natural tendency to sympathize, and the accompanying tendency to pay money to do so, the disabled have become easily exploited. A lack of an adequate and competitive media presence which would offer alternate representations of the disabled has whittled the public perception of the disabled down to a few marketable characteristics, their “need” for pity being at the forefront.
Overall, yes the current situation is one out of balance; however, all things considered pity by itself is not such a bad feeling to have.
I have run into this same problem as you, except I seem to be blessed with the knowledge of: at least someone knows, and that someone also understands it and is ok (that someone is a mom). We get along really well. I know how hard it was to tell her how I actually wanted this to happen, how I felt perfectly normal while doing it, but she took it nice and easy. I was so embarrased, I wrote a note while she wasn’t in the room, gave her the note all folded up, and went outside and walked around. When I came back in, we had a nice discussion about it, and she said it didn’t bother her. My dad, unfortunately, did not take it nicely. He actually went searching through my history folder, then tried to cover up his dissapointment and anger with a common: the internet is a bad place, and now is definitely not the time to have free run of it. However, my dad is the type of person who does not easily understand things that are different from him, so I wasn’t surprised.
I guess my point is that the reaction you get totally depends on what the person that you are telling believes and is ok with. Knowing them well makes it a million times easier and less stressful.
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1 On 6 January, 2007, Sean said:
Piss on pity!