Connected

Disability has changed how I relate to the world and the people around me; it has even changed the possibility of whether or not we can connect. (Do you turn away or towards the disabled woman on the dance floor?)

It has effectively destroyed the old ways we related in family life, cutting through older understandings of each other. We have not recovered. We might be beginning to look for new ways, but mostly we have not returned to the old. Disability has made the rifts and tensions that were in my family into positive canyons studded with landmines. Ain't no one ever going there or coming back.

Perhaps these splits would have happened regardless of disability; there might have been some other trigger that would have revealed the weaknesses in the ways we relate, but as it was, it was disability.

I don't really want to run into the long story. Don't you ever feel that you cannot, simply cannot, tell that story again; the very negativity of it is a horror by itself. (Stops evil self from regurgitating with glee some of the awful quotes from hours of screaming family rows; blogger self envisions a post that is just a series of quotes, one after the other, all taken out of context, with every word twisted, of course. Uh oh. Blogger self actually did that -- petty revenge or expiation of pain?).

What disability has taught me is the power of movement. And movement is relationship. As a performer, you can't just push onto the stage, do your thing, and roll off. Even if you execute everything perfectly, you won't have made a connection with your audience -- you have to be able to connect with the dancers around you and with the people you can't see, people somewhere out there in the audience. Even before that, though, the most important part of movement is your relationship with your body: disability taught me that.

I've always been a non-body person. I used not to do "goofy-new-age" arts and rituals; even when I was a semi-professional musician, I relied on my technique and my soul to produce music. My body was not part of the picture. If I cared about my body at all, it was in relationship to my appearance. I didn't connect appearance to body, though; I thought appearance was in the absence of body -- it's thinness -- and in the face. I didn't know that body, or perhaps, I should say, embodiment, is the key to appearance.

I managed without a body-sense until I was in my early thirties. I tried not to look too often in the mirror; I moved through the world preceded, I hoped, by my accreditations. I was an academic type; I had degrees, publications. I could take your argument down in seconds or freeze you with the twitch of an eyebrow, the slide of my pair of glasses. I lived for what my brain could produce. But then, suddenly, there was the body.

Disability has taught me to perceive the world through the physicality of my embodiment (as opposed to say, the lens of my race). It started for me with the perception of pain and its absences. The learning journey continued with misperception, paresthesia, and involuntary movement -- a care program, medication, and now physical therapy. I watched how others constructed narratives around and for me, regardless of my actual self.

Disability asks you stop and look at yourself -- because if you don't, you will go under. It asks you to take note, to test, experiment, try, fail, and test again. It unleashes fear. Sadness. And fear again. It asks you to be your fullest self (Weird, right, because the rest of the world thinks of it as an end).

For me, I learned from disability, how to move in dance. That, too, was a body-led, disability-based experience. Repeated passes across the floor -- moving on a high, low, medium level. In a group, with the group, starting, stopping, fast pace, slow pace, medium. All these with an understanding that these parameters were individual and contingent: fast for me on that day, high for me on that day. Such instructions meant that I was the only obstacle in the room. No longer was dance an exclusionary discourse; we each of us in that class dug deep, disabled and non to learn what the body teaches.