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Home / Thoughts / Sean's Thoughts / Thoughts exchange with a friend.

Thoughts exchange with a friend.

Written by Sean on Wednesday, December 29, 1999

I recently exchanged a couple mails with a friend from the other end of the world. She has been disabled from birth, and has done some research in our little world. I believe her discoveries along the way gave her other point of views when looking at herself in relation to her disability. Here are a few quotes and answers.

<<Wannabe text arouses so many conflicting emotions in me that I find extraordinary.>>

I can see that. I’m sure I’d have very conflicting emotions myself, were I in your position. Heck, I have conflicting emotions as I speak/type/blabber off :-()

<<It’s deeply subversive, I guess. And deeply weird. And somewhat offensive, which I find most interesting. Why is it offensive? I guess it’s that conflict between disabilities you desire; and disabilities you were stuck with. And yet, and yet, the tension between both those situations strike me as rich for building bridges between different aspects of disabilities - because I have come to the conclusion that wannabes are disabled in their own way too. >>

I wish more people in the disabled/online community could see it that way. I really think that each camp (and I hate having camps) has something to bring the other. One very simple example of that is the amount of insight into paraplegia Deanna was able to give me, while I was able to show her that wheeling doesn’t have to be a drag and one can even have some fun at it… Of course, there’s so much more to it.

Also, (and I may have told you that at some point already), I believe that the mental/emotional of being disabled or a wannabe is very similar. Striving for something you’ll likely never have. Know that in all likelyhood, it will never go away, and that even if we sometimes delude ourselves in thinking we’re handling it just fine, there will always be something around the corner, waiting to jump on us and shake our hard won advances. Perhaps things are a tad different if you’ve been disabled from birth, or for decades. Dunno… I’ve also been told I was full of shit :-)

[wannabes are disabled too]. <<That’s not meant to be a put-down, rather it’s meant to be an offering of a welcome, if not to “the club”, then to a community of human sensitivity of difference. Some of us cripples get into a superiority thing - I know I do - a sort of “I’m the only one who suffers” - a sort of narrow reading of what difference is - so reading these texts enlarges that view to embrace you guys in a very confronting way. >>

I find it interesting that you’d think being called disabled is a put-down. Different approaches, different perspectives. I think most wannabes would rather be perceived as disabled, rather than perverts.

Given the community I now evolve in, I have a lot of examples of that superiority thing… People with SCI’s are better than people with CP, and wheelers in general are really the true disabled, yet ampies and deafies often don’t consider themselves disabled while wanting to “profit” from the ADA. Only when we all come together, united, will we really be able to achieve anything.

And yet, I’ve never felt as welcome, taken at face value, anywhere else than in this community. I’ve searched high and low, joined sports club, did extreme things like jumping off planes or climbing rock faces, joined professional associations. Never have I felt this welcome… Weird feeling of finally belonging. And I don’t know if it’s “just” because I’m using a chair and I fit in, or if it’s because I’ve “felt” disabled all my life and suddenly fit in a group that I strongly identify with?

<<One thing I do find kind of funny is the enjoyment many wannabes take in being stared at when they’re pretending - the biggest thing I hate about being a crip. Have fantasised many times about being invisible.>>

Yes, that’s interesting. Lot of people in the wanna/tender crowd crave that. Heck, I’ve been “guilty” of it myself. Though after two plus years of wheeling full time I don’t pay much attention to it. Or rather, I don’t enjoy the attention, I just go about my business. And I positively hate the “good” mother who grabs her kids out of the way as I wheel past them, 3 meters away, as if I was contagious, or was going to loose control and run over her kids.

Over the years, I’ve come to have a problem with the pretenders out there that kind of make light of it all, going out just to fill this craving for attention. They usualy are the people who really don’t give a shit about what it really means [to be disabled?]. If there is an argument to be made about pretenders “ruining” the efforts of the disabled population, this would be it. Some guys and gals out there just don’t think about what they do. Some within our group don’t really ponder the consequences of their actions on the next person behind them. <shrug again>

It makes me think about how we actually put ourselves fairly commonly into the sensation of being disabled or different and there is this widespread desire to be changed in some way physically, whether through psychoactive drugs, or sweaty ritual or mountain-climbing or being a wannabe - that we share this desire to kind of shape-change and shift ourselves out of the familiar.

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