Don't wanna indulge in sadness. There's hardly any good in doing so. But this aspect is relevant, and maybe its awareness can improve someone else's life. Disability can bring a very special kind of loneliness. It's not that being disabled implies in not having friends, although this can happen as well. Loneliness I'm talking about is a much deeper one. So much so, that if not acknowledged, it can really destroy someone's life.
What does being together mean? What are the reasons behind our social nature and our almost constant attraction to other people?
Maybe all of them spring from our animal basic needs such as food, sex and shelter. We're one of the species that rely the most on social groups for these needs to be satisfied. In primal settings, a single human hunter was a very easy target to better physically equipped predators. Not only that, but these fellows could also be an easy pray to other humans. Total intra-species competition would make the whole humanity weaker and more prone to be extinct. But our huge brains have allowed us to drop this idea of total war and join forces collectively, thus becoming a very powerful multipurpose machine. Somehow people realized the results of fighting the environment and other men at the same time would yield less average benefits than collaborating.
But this has happened thousands of years ago. What about us? How do we relate to each other in this hypertrophied highly specialized society? Maybe all this sophistication we have today is just the natural historical evolution from a very well coordinated hunting machine. Maybe the basic principles that have made us stick to each other are still out there, but they just have a different external appearance, exactly because of all this sophistication and complexity.
In any case, it seems to me that the most fundamental ingredient for these social systems to work is that individuals have the ability to see themselves in others and in the whole society at large. When someone sees herself in another person, they are no longer two entirely different entities. They become a new organism, that will act on its own needs which in turn will get individual needs satisfied as well.
This is true for a group of friends, for a family, a city or even a country. In all these cases, people need to identify with each other, so they can collaborate to reach common goals. Trust is born from the awareness that the person in front of me has similar feelings, desires and needs (empathy). Therefore we have a common ground upon which we're going to build a collective existence together that is much more interesting and richer than what each of the individuals could provide for themselves in isolation.
Interpersonal bonds are stronger when people share a larger common ground. This can potentially maximize alignment and make agreement something more natural. It's not impossible to have a good friend that lives a totally different life compared to yours. But in this case, identification is different and mutual exchange can be limited and asymmetrical, making bonds weaker (at least friendship ones). This is also truth in terms of distance. It's usually much easier to maintain friendship with people that are physically close to us, because that facilitates the sense of availability we feel from them, and enlarges the common ground we have with each other. Very often people are close friends during school and grow steadily apart as they get engaged in different social environments.
Besides being physically close, common experiences are hugely important to build affinity. Maybe because of the evolutionary background mentioned above, we tend to feel safer and happier when we can share our experiences. Not necessarily because others can actively do something about a problem we're facing (although that can also be the case) but because sharing makes us feel stronger and more capable to tackle all the problems in the world.
This might make up for a good explanation about why rehabilitated disabled people can feel so bad and lonely, even being in much better absolute conditions than the folks that never went through this process. Rehabilitation is hard work. It hurts, it can suck all your energy, but usually it delivers a great deal of functional improvement compared to doing nothing (depending on the nature of the underlying condition).
Issue is we are social beings. It is rarely enough to perform better in daily activities. Performing them differently (in time or fashion) from the way most people like us do means losing the possibility to share similar experiences. Of course it's better for me to be able to move slower and with a cane than not to be able to move around at all. It's quite stupid not to acknowledge that. But this doesn't take social needs into account. So it creates the surreal experience of being a massive success and a huge failure simultaneously. The "mere physical issue" thesis is blown away at this point. Someone can be smart enough to make it in all intellectual tasks that generally lead to some degree of material success. But then there's common ground. While this person can theoretically perform all the necessary activities in a job description, the perception part and also the self-motivation part are usually not fulfilled.
This adds up to the unequal quality of the world we inhabit. You can indeed train a somewhat disabled person to perform all the tasks needed to live a good life in society. But the fact they will be done differently and thus won't let easy identification happen will create a gap that theoretically didn't necessarily have to exist. In other words, the worst thing about disability may not be disability itself, with all its pains and difficulties. It may well be loneliness. Because maybe you're able to do so many things but at the same time you are too different. Your life is very different and because of that you can't really see yourself in others and usually they can't see themselves in you either.
Making the huge effort for being capable and capability itself make you go only a small part of the way. The rest of it, albeit physically possible is socially unattainable. This is the paradox of rehabilitation and, in my opinion, it's the saddest thing about disability.
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