It's pretty clear to me per research data that exclusion is a factual reality in disability. For my specific subtype I even have the figures in my head and they are not pretty at all. And it's also crystal clear how this process has operated in my life on a daily basis for more than 30 years. That means I've got more than 30 years of concrete examples in which it has happened as a comic act, repeated ad infinitum.
Now I even have the theoretical framework through which the whole thing has repeated over and over again. The question is: once you see a train is coming and you know it will hit a car full of people that unfortunately has got a dead engine right in the middle of the crossing, what should you do?
Maybe more important than that, can you hate someone for letting disaster happen because of inability to see the train? I've got this newly discovered moral framework which this person clearly ignores. What if what this subject is doing is completely compliant with the tacit and explicit laws that govern current society? It may seem quite superfluous at this miserable point as my energy gets completely drained with the tragedy I'm the only one who see. But I don't want to be unfair and immoral myself.
Am I living the last breaths of a dyeing pathological false mainstream identity, like that of people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and defending their violent captors? Or am I trying to be a better person and not trigger the sort of suffering I'm going through because social acceptable standards are not yet on my side? I wanted out.
When I was younger, maybe because my teen years were not fulfilling at all, I used to feel I was born at the wrong time in history. A sort of too old to rock'n'roll and too young to die kind of mood. I wanted out. Today I was driving my car in the heavy traffic of this chaotic and crowded city and I felt the same urge to escape from this dimension. Again, it felt as if I was really claustrophobic. But the air conditioning was turned on, I was listening to good music, sitting comfortably and yet I felt I was going to drown in this air, this century, this city, this world.
I've had a flashback and recalled feeling the same way sometimes when I was very little, like 2 or so. And while I don't remember the reason that made me feel like that at the time, I can surely tell it was exactly the same feeling. The feeling of being expelled from the face of the Earth by the wrong shape of my own flesh. The feeling of inadequacy that I now recognize so well, but that at the time was just a raw and empty sense of doom.
And I remember understanding my body was ruined and there wasn't anything that would make me get better. The thoughts that would come from this conclusion were articulating the wish of not have being born at all, which is quite sophisticated, but very sad for a three year old kid to grasp. Twisting the time in my head was the only way to repair my broken body, and in the concrete impossibility of that, escaping from Earthly existence through a window in time seemed to be the correct answer.
So today when I was in the car, I've realized that I wasn't feeling claustrophobic because of the present traffic noise and smell. My feeling came from the fact that, as with my broken body, this city feels sick beyond repair and it tends to get its arteries increasingly clotted with cars, and people and in a noisy crack it will eventually collapse under its own weight. And again at that precise moment, there was nothing for me to do about that. Same as there's still nothing I can do thirty years later about my body. My vessel through this human existence. It's still treated as broken, and navigating the one way stream of time, the only thing it can do is to get old, without never having tasted the clear and calm waters of youth.
But today was a different day. Not because my daily problems at work were solved or because I've finally become something good in the collective eyes of consumption driven society which I live to serve. Today was a different day because for the first time in more than 30 years, there was a tiny space that separated myself from the broken image I've been cursed with from the start. The accompanying voice saying I was a mistake wasn't mine anymore. I felt the warmth of the good intentions of my curse, and that I even have something to be grateful about.
Because my body is not my curse. It has actually handled all these attacks from inside and out relatively well. Then I've realized I don't have to free myself from my body, or from this city, or this world. My body can be the means through which I can and will do something truly remarkable. Not because able bodied people surrounding me will tell my salvation depends on being a hero for climbing the stairs. Or because I'll be accepted by them for whom I really am and my material life will change for the better. Truth is the opposite.
For once I felt I'll be precisely at a place I've always wandered about in my dreams. A tiny portion of Earth from which I will be able to see human beliefs start moving, and justice as conceived today furiously swinging as an old tree on a thunderstorm, rocking and twisting, finally falling in a burst of fury. And I will part take in what I've always felt was lost forever. Something that would have made my existence meaningful only if I lived my happy days as someone young, healthy and loved and perfect. But I will be part of real change and the tiny piece of Earth I'll taste it from will be my body.
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