Meta Essay

This blog is a funny exercise. On one hand, I've shared things that are among those most delicate and intimate to me. I've also said things, based on true first hand experience, which acknowledgement would theoretically have the potential for very serious and tangible implications, sometimes including jail. On the other, the lack of feedback, in the form of comments, criticism or even views of this content gives a weird impression that there's no difference in publicizing all this here, or just storing these thoughts, ideas, and experiences on a hard drive no one will ever read.

I know during this journey I've sometimes added perspectives and ideas here that are not mainstream at all and which understanding could lead to a whole new way to approach certain issues. I think I've done that ad nauseaum when it comes to disability related topics.

Living on the wrong side of this fence, I'm positive about both the implications of the status quo manner to treat these issues at the same time I can see clearly why people on the other side keep doing it. And by the means of a very hard and painful experience, I feel I have come up with valid alternatives, that would make the world a better place, certainly for people with disability, but not only them. And much sooner than all the research dedicated to cure so called disabling conditions.

But maybe precisely for being at the wrong side of this fence, my words don't carry enough weight. Maybe people consider me as just a moron that advocates for his own interests, using disability as a lame excuse. Hence, I'm having second thoughts about keeping writing all this down here.

Whereas this has helped a great deal to make my mind clear about countless issues that would happen to me over and over again, without creating the ability to extract any useful wisdom from them, I think throwing this clarity in the virtual air has probably reached the top limit in terms of actual social change. And unfortunately, it is ridiculously low.

I'm surely at a more comfortable position now. It's much better to know why you're being repeatedly beaten up, even when this awareness can't do much to avoid the beating in the first place or that people around me will keep themselves comfortably in warm denial. I now know who I am, and above all, I finally came to the realization about why my outcomes in life are so much smaller than the effort I've had to put up in order to get them. I'm sure I did my best, and I don't have to beat myself up because playing the game never did, and never will get me where I was promised to go.

I'm also positive to have finally been able to crack this code in the last 9 months or so (even though I had been trying to do that since I was first able to have some degree of self-awareness). Now what? I'm far from contempt, although I'm not desperate or sick. Together with all these findings, I've also figured out most people around me consider my under rewarded position to make sense. Some of them can't grasp the asymmetry in terms of conditions at so many levels disabled folks are usually cursed with. Others just don't give a damn.

This tends to reinforce my understanding that the only way to put these matters in the general agenda is to collectively mobilize as a group, and basically fight. When I've considered myself part of the status quo, even against all the odds, I'd also think breaking and burning things was pointless. There were surely more constructive ways to make a point. But if you look at history, it's quite easy to relate social change to war, violence, revolution, insurgency, you name it.

It's only logical people that are privileged by the current socioeconomic structure find a lot of merit in it, and create several mechanisms which compliance keeps things exactly the way they are. Transformation can only come if there's a force to tilt the scale to the other side. Mere reflection about right and wrong, or revealing the true nature of prejudice and abuse won't do that. This is why it's probably time this blog becomes a book.

This is likely the form in which it can be most useful to those that actually want to understand things under a different light and do something about it. And then, as with my own life, I'll also need to find a different way to make the world a place a bit less frustrating and unfair. But right now, I'm totally clueless about how to do either things.

A short one for a change!

When you feel you've been integrated and accepted, you're hanging out with friends and having a good time, there's a huge probability something really simple related to how our external environment is organized is going to happen, and that will automatically make you hop off your cloud and go straight to hell. Alone.

It might be an activity you can't perform well enough, the speed you're able to move around, aesthetic considerations from people inside or outside your inner social circle, or the awareness about the cumulative effect of all that over your life so far and beyond.

The world is too large, and the external environment that causes this asymmetry appears to be just too resistant, too hard to change. Especially when most people around don't even see what might be possibly wrong with it.

Automatic thought that pops up in the disabled person's mind? Wouldn't it be much easier if I just wasn't here? Everybody is happy in this situation except for me. So why the hell is someone going to change anything, ever?

I must confess although I know this is unfair, and not the truth about how the world really works, I still have this recurrent and automatic thought. And although I'm theoretically convinced things must change, something inside just wants me to disappear.