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Home / Thoughts / Control, independence, etc

Control, independence, etc

Written by Sean on Saturday, September 23, 2006

It’s been one of those nights where I was sound asleep, yet thinking "fast & furiously". Thoughts were going so fast they might even have burned some grey cells! Ha! Not quite, but you know how it goes. Usualy, I wake up with a vague recollection of having thought about stuff. This morning, I had a few keywords in mind. I was thinking about control. I was thinking about being transabled and all the themes of control and independence that float around disability.

What’s pulling our strings?
Are we in control?

It seems all my life I’ve had to be in control. As a kid, I’ve had to make some rather big decisions. I also grew up with an alcoholic father, with all that involves. I am not a control freak, but I like being in control. I like to know what’s going to happen and how. Planning is good. As I said in another post, I also have routines, which are really another form of control, though those routines are there to help me deal with depression.

At work, I tend to take control of things. Even when I’m not in charge, if I see something going wrong in the process, I get in and fix it. I take charge, and this has landed me with the "boss’" job on more occasions than I care to recall.

It was once suggested to me that my desire to wheel was my psyche playing the symbols trick on me, that I used the wheelchair as a symbol that I needed to give up control. It made a lot of sense at the time, and I don’t fully reject the idea, but it would be a mistake to think it’s the only thing, or even the major aspect of my need to be a paraplegic.

It’s true that as a para I would have to give up control of things. The most obvious is losing control of my legs, bladder, dick, etc… Going through the hospital/rehab would certainly be a thing that can’t be controlled, etc.

The thing is, I feel more in control of myself when I wheel. It seems paradoxical to think that a situation where you have less physical control, you feel more emotionally in control. It is the case for me however. I guess some might relate that to aspects of BDSM, where the Dominant appears to be in charge while in fact it is the submissive that really controls the situation. Life is strange and wonderful, things are not often as they appear on the surface.

Perhaps it’s more a question of independence than control. Although the two seem to run hand-in-hand in my mind, I don’t know. I was asking my friend Ian if he’d be happy as a quadriplegic. He said that he probably wouldn’t. He added that perhaps with some hand function he’d be ok, but that:

"I’m not afraid of disability, I’m afraid of loss of independence"

This was an interesting statement. It verbalised something I had been thinking about for a long time, without ever really putting it into words. But losing independence like that seems to imply losing control, at first sight. It doesn’t though: You can be in control of various things in your life even if you can’t be independently doing some things for yourself.

My own answer to the question "would you be happy as a quad?" is that I wouldn’t be unhappy as a quad. I know I’d get on with my life. It’s not what I want. But it would give me part of what I’m looking for. I’m sure I’d be frustrated beyond all beliefs. But I wouldn’t really be any worse off than any other quad out there, and I’d cope.

And so, the question of control and independence goes unresolved. I just know it’s floating around. I know I like to be in control, I know I’d have to give up control of some things in my life, but independence would remain.

[tags]Transabled, Wheelchair, Quadriplegic, Paraplegic, Independence, Control, Disability, Impairment[/tags]