jimmyrudyjump's Blog

Back by popular demand: much ado about v-blogs...

I came across two interesting people, recently. Both here on EP. Both disabled. One clustered to a wheelchair, the other hopping around using protheses.
What struck my about both, is that they don't 'suffer' from that disability. On the contrary, they are among to more down-to-earth, cheery people around. With the exception of SunniOne, that is. The latter does her name honor and outshines everybody in a 15000 mile radius -here's to you hon.

But back to what I was musing about.

What struck me when thinking about being disabled, is that quite a lot of people are indeed disabled, but most of them are so in the head. The two people I mentioned aren't disabled in the head. They just have the bad luck to be in the position they are. The thing is that they learned to cope, learned to live with it -or better, without it.

It's only us -the mentally disabled ones- who see other folks who are in wheelchairs or using crutches and/or missing limbs as being disabled. And in doing so, we degrade those people to something they are not. They are not disabled. They are missing some parts or cannot do the things everybody else does thanks to the limitations of movement, yes, but they are not disabled.

But, then again, it is again us who limit others in their movements, because we are selfish and refuse to adapt our surroundings so that everybody would be able to move freely about. It is us, thanks to our own mental disability that make the others what they are -or what we think they are.

When push comes to shove, it's not because someone who's in a wheelchair can't do some of the things we do, that this person is disabled. There's lots of stuff I can do that others can't and vice-versa. There's also bound to be a few things the two people I have in mind can do that I can't.

It's just something that struck me, just now. I think it is high time a lot of us stop feeling all high and mighty because we think we are 'better', or, the other way round, that people who are 'not complete' are disabled and should be treated as such.

In the end, it's not us degrading those people, but we're degrading ourselves without realizing it. And we also do not realize that in our patronizing behaviour, we are causing the other more grief than they usually have from being 'different'...

Time to humanize ourselves a bit more then, don't you think?


JJ