Overcoming And Success: II

Disability challenges what we think we know, as a society, about overcoming and success -- though you would never figure this out from mainstream news media or people on the street.

For the average passerby, success means overcoming your disability.  Whether you've climbed a mountain, pushed a marathon, or simply sipped your coffee, success is yours because you have overcome.  In fact, overcoming is your primary success.  Even if you have climbed that mountain, won a Paralympic gold medal, you will pretty much always have managed to overcome your disability.

I laugh when I think about what people are trying to do here.  Non-disabled emphasis on overcoming is meant to encourage the disabled person, to assure her of her place in the world.  It's meant to show her that she isn't limited by her disability or condemned to a successless/failful life.  It's supposed to bring a disabled person into community and into contact with the "rest" of the world.

But the thing about disability is that you cannot overcome it.  No matter what you do.  You can be successful, yes.  You can deal with it -- successfully, yes.  But you cannot defeat or conquer it.  You might manage to defeat, challenge, even overcome other people's expectations for you and for people with your diagnosis, but whatever it is you successfully managed to do, you did it with and in your body.  Some things take willpower.  More willpower than you ever thought you could have.  But that's not you overcoming your disability.  That's you drawing every last piece of strength and strength you didn't know was there to, say, get out of bed.  To go to physical therapy.  To take your medication, go to counseling, get out on the street, look people in the eye, and/or challenge the prejudice they are confronting you with.  That's you and your disability out there.  Together.

I know this.  At least in theory.  When I can keep hold of it, I know that I do better when I work with what the mainstream world would call my limitations.  I don't see pushing myself and pushing my limits as defeating disability; I experience something like dancing as taking my limitations and exploring them. I'm not overcoming, but moving with.  I know that I work even better when I allow my body to exist without judgment.  I do my very best when I allow what others would judge negatively to become features -- to exist in their own right, without correction.  There is no defeating here; there's only living.  And learning to live in an integrated fashion.

Part I is here.