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Home / Thoughts / Sean's Thoughts / Insight about barriers

Insight about barriers

Written by Sean on Sunday, April 5, 1998

For the last 6-7 months, my contact with wheelers has been from my chair. I also have had more contact with more wheelers in this period than ever before. Last week, I met a couple of para’s, but the way it happened, I wasn’t using my wheelchair.

At the time, I felt really weird. The two wheelers were very nice, open and warm. But something was missing, or something was wrong, unusual. I couldn’t identify it, but it bothered me until a little later, while driving home.

That’s when I realized there had been a fence of sort, a barrier between “them” and me, which I wasn’t used to feel. So I felt the fence, I got a real sense of the chasm between AB’s and PWD. Something I hadn’t really lived before. I was intellectually aware of it, but now, I could almost taste it.

PWD are so often subject to rejection or ostracism in one way or another that they learn soon after injury to self protect themselves by distancing themselves from AB’s. They may remain friendly, have no negativity at all, still, they won’t interact with most AB’s the way they would with another wheeler. Often times, it’s not even conscious.

When I started frequenting wheelers so much, I was included in the group, in the community. No words were ever said about it, and while I knew it, I never really paid attention to it. I just was “in”. Now, to find myself standing around wheelers just emphasized the fence. I was still the same person knowing the same things about wheeling, but they didn’t know that…

{mospagebreak}

So this time, it was like having lived with a child for a while, and then seeing the kid back after a two years absence… Changes were so evident. People I’ve told don’t seem much impressed by it, and yet, I found it fascinating.

I don’t believe someone with a disability could get the feel of it in this way. They can be aware, but not taste the difference as I did. Just like I have a fair idea of what it is like to be a para, but I will never *know*. At the same time, I don’t think that even a pretender would be able to feel it, unless they spent a *lot* of time around other wheelers, they wouldn’t have a frame of reference to see.

Where does that leave me? I don’t know. I just thought it was my most interesting insight in a long time… Am I going to react differently with stand ups when I am wheeling? I don’t know. I’m not sure I was putting up fences, but I guess I was, I guess I am… Have to see. Have to observe myself.

A friend of mine commented on it, about me being slammed on the bulletin boards, and she says that one of the reasons PWD get so defensive is that:

The most interesting thing of all, Sean, is that you are experiencing a splintered facet of “the fence” in this self-righteous outrage coming from those on the Devotee & Disabled board [on AOL]. They probably don’t even realize themselves that one reason they’re so angry is that you have inadvertently slipped past the fence. In their eyes you’re an AB who can live in their world, within the wheeler realm and emotional culture, *and they won’t recognize you*. I personally think this explains, at least in part, their overly intense, defensive yet insupportable stance on the subject.

More thoughts to be had on this topic, but I’d been procrastinating too much and too long, had to write a little *something*….