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Home / Thoughts / Of belonging

Of belonging

Written by Sean on Monday, December 3, 2007

I’ve spoken about "belonging" a few times before. Everyone needs to belong, somewhere, somehow (well, almost everyone). But those of us with Body Integrity Identity Disorder don’t really belong anywhere, do we? I mean, in which group do we fit? Do we belong to the world of people without a disability? Do we belong to the disability community? Where do we fit?

I never really felt I belonged anywhere as much as when I was active in the disability community. I wrote about that here: http://transabled.org/thoughts/sean-thoughts/more-on-belonging.htm and here: http://transabled.org/thoughts/sean-thoughts/belonging.htm. But one wonders at times, did I really belong? Had the people I was surrounded with known the reason for which I use a wheelchair, would they have accepted me and welcomed me in the fold in the same way? I doubt it.

I don’t belong in the non-disabled community (if there is such a thing). I may be (mostly) AB but I don’t belong. My inner being and identification is that of someone with a (physical) disability, and my life experience for the last dozen year has been that of a wheelchair user. I can no more identify to AB’s than I can identify to African American.

I am told I don’t belong in the disability community either, because I don’t have the "non-negotiable" qualifying characteristic - that of having a physical impairment. I hear the argument, and it has value. But, and there is a but, I’ve also been told I "got it" better than a lot of people with disabilities, that is, I understood and lived the issues more than a lot of people with disabilities. So, I feel like I belong, I’ve been accepted in the community. Although one might also argue that did the people I mingled with knew about BIID rather than thinking I was a para, they would have reacted differently.

I guess I do belong to the group of people who have mental illnesses, but that’s not really a community. People don’t band together in the same way as the ‘disability community’ does. But this is not a group that you really want to belong to. People with mental illnesses rate lower than pondscum on most people’s radar. Ostracised even by our brethren with physical impairments.

funny thing is, I don’t think that those people who reject us now because we don’t have a physical impairment would accept us any better because we would have achieved our ideal body image. There would always be a reason not to accept, not to include. After all, we would be in the situation of having actually wanted our impairment, whereas they didn’t.

So, doomed to not belong anywhere, unless we lie.

[tags]Belonging, Community, Disability, Mental Illness, Wheelchair, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, BIID, Impairment[/tags]