Pleasures of a Disabled Body

I have been reading Blue (here and here) and Piny on disability and pleasure. Blue quotes me in places -- thank you -- I am stimulated to write more.

I have an acquired disability; I became disabled over the course of a number of years. The process had some sharp, clearly defined transition points (September 21st, 2000, was, for example, a particularly bad day; I woke up and was barely able to walk), but mostly it was a slow flow -- an arbitrary ebbing back and forth -- into this new world. I am not saying I was happy about it -- my friends will remember the hours of ranting on the phone -- I want to talk about how and where I discovered pleasure in my body before, after, and during this transition.

Prior to becoming disabled, I felt the usual pressures about my relationship to the ideal female body: I worried about my weight, my thighs, my butt, ... etc. I was concerned about the racialized female body. Where were the gorgeous non-white women? Why were African-American facial features deemed ugly? As I remember it, I can recall feeling some pleasure in my body while I ran (I used to run 20 miles a week). I know I rather liked my wicked, winning sexual self. For the most part, however, I barely noticed -- tried not to notice -- my physical body. I worked in a world that professed admiration for the mind while pretending to ignore the body.

When, in this world, I started to use a wheelchair, I, for the most part, tried to ignore it. I was still the same person, after all. I was just experiencing pain and other physical symptoms. Materially, even substantially, I would have argued, I hadn't changed. I was just using a wheelchair (or whatever it was that day).

Becoming disabled is/was not an easy process. It's not just a matter of impairment; that can happen overnight. Disability is, as Neil Marcus puts it, "an art. It's an ingenious way to live." Becoming disabled was, for me, more than a way of figuring out how to use a wheelchair or how to live around pain or how to live with the various other issues surrounding my physicality. And, as I became disabled, I became reacquainted with my body.

It's weird. I still worry about my weight, my hair, my thighs... all the things I worried about when I was walking around in the TAB world. BUT, strangely enough, I don't hate them in the same way, with the same intensity. Disability has brought acceptance.

Neither, do I loathe the physical manifestations of my disability. I could hate my legs, hands, and feet. But I don't. I want to decorate them with outrageous shoes and sexy gloves. I've even hennaed my hands (mehndi looks great!). I have come out of myself in my disabled body. My hair has a blond chunk and a purple streak (natural was never my style). I could hate my chair, but I don't. I rather actively like it. It suits me.

I am a new person with a new body. And I am having fun with it. There are days when I cry from dull pain; when it hurts to move with sharp pain. There are days when the pain seems unending. There are days when I don't move from the couch. There are moments, but quite honestly, not whole days when I recognize that my life would be MUCH easier if I could go back to my previous life, but I don't actively wish to go back to the sense of penned-inness that came with my previous body in its previous like. I LIKE my current body and my chair. And I am happy in the freedoms disability has revealed to me.

I still have fun, fantastic sex (yes, difficult family member, believe it. Thank you for asking and intruding into my life). Yes, it's different, but I am able to bring to it a kind of physical wholeness that I never achieved before. I even appreciate the sheets more: soft sheets interact with interact with the parts of my body where I have paresthesias in peculiar ways.

I am proud to be a dancer. I love the way I move my chair and move in my chair. I love what dance does for me, for my fellow dancers, and for the audience. Movement is phenomenal. And it's not just about the endorphins, either. We are making, doing, being art. I enjoy that. Do I miss running 20 miles a week? I ran because I feared getting fat; I ran because I feared my body. Do I miss that? No way. Do I miss the feeling of being in my stride and running flat out? No. Because I do that with my chair. My favourite movement right now involves stroking that comes from chair into my body (as opposed to simply pushing down on the wheels). Ha.

I still have the life of my mind, but it is also, now, closely connected to the life of my body. This somehow feels healthier.

These, some of the pleasures of MY disabled body, are doubled by an awareness that the rest of the world cannot imagine that they exist. I know what I imagine TABS cannot know. And this (perhaps real, perhaps accurate, but perhaps not) perception creates a kind of inner smile. A double layer of consciousness; I'm having fun, experiencing a kind of pleasure, and you will never know it.