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A meeting with Chaeli Mycroft has left me contemplating disability, from the inside out. Chaeli was born with severe cerebral palsy that left her paralyzed in her legs and with hampered use of her hands. What she has had to negotiate in her life and what her daily routine must be to do the simple things that we take for granted, like dressing and using the bathroom, I cannot imagine. I was struck dumb by her at once hilarious and wise person with a depth of thinking beyond her 21 years, not to mention her guts and courage at attempting and achieving daring feats like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
But as I listened to her speak and observed her disabled body at work, I couldn’t help wonder about the disabilities people carry that we cannot see; disabilities that reside within a person and are not obvious from the exterior form. What of people who carry trauma – rape, abuse, neglect, witnesses to war atrocities or suffer with alcoholism, addiction, anxiety, depression? Or perhaps experiences that are not trauma, but life happenings such as retrenchment, bankruptcy, divorce, betrayal, deep loss, though these arguably are traumatic in their way too, often eliciting shame, the invisible silencer.
What I’m trying to probe into is that Chaeli has had to negotiate her disability consciously from day one of her life or her life simply would not take flight. But invisible disabilities can be pushed aside, repressed, split off from and ignored, without doubt to the detriment of the person’s well-being and indeed ‘flight’. Yet it is most probable that these ‘imperfections’ will be hidden from view, from both the self and others.
And as I watched Chaeli, I thought that external disability insists that the person rise above it, work with it and grow through it, with the focus being on what is possible rather than impossible. This prompted reflection. Imagine if we embrace our imperfections, hurts, failures and life stories with the gusto and forthrightness that a disabled body must?
Imagine if we owned them, accepted them and worked with them as a matter of course. To work with our inner selves rather than against, a brave journey indeed. We’d integrate and heal so much sooner. We’d be kinder…to ourselves and in turn others. What a novel thought. We’d have less shame and in turn less blame, more laughter, acceptance, courage and connection.
If I think of my closest friendships, they emerged within adversity, betwixt a sharing of struggle or felt experience. It is when we are unmasked that we connect. And yet as a society we’re increasingly obsessed with outward appearance. Perhaps no more than in times of old, but we have the 20th and 21st century elixir of social media to promote our exteriors to fabulous degrees. Our lives are so very different to our Facebook postings, so much richer and more complex and filled with ups and downs. And yet we aspire to presenting one-dimensional exteriors of ‘the good times’ (myself included, I don’t post my challenging days online). Why? Why when all the research points to the opposite? It is vulnerability that we connect with, humanity that we crave; witness to our own struggles and a sharing of our triumphs.
I’m certainly not advocating for an inappropriate ‘floodlighting’ of our internal struggles, but rather a more balanced sharing of our selves and an embracing of our whole journey. As a close friend once said to me after I blushingly regaled him with a tale of personal difficulty, in between snorts of laughter from us both (a tragicomedy if you will) ‘show me a person who hasn’t been through some kind of crisis by their mid-30’s’… I remember at the time, breathing out and becoming part of the human race again.
Disability needs much more visibility in our world – both visibly disabled bodies and invisible disabled hearts.
Mediating being human continues…
