Many view disability as something to overcome. As an identity that’s lesser, misled by a societal script that’s worked hard to brainwash us into believing that a human being is synonymous with a ‘human doing’.
That we have to be a slave to its machine and produce until we die (churning and burning our lives for its self-serving gain), in order to exist. As a gradually broken-down worker on a conveyor belt of outputs, discarded once too ill or too old to ‘matter’.
But what the machine doesn’t want you to know is that what matters is not what we produce or do in a day or lifetime: it’s how we exist. What we are. How we are. It’s our state of being and our being present in that very being.
And that’s where society, and by proxy, the public, get it wrong: our existence has never been about ‘doing’; it has always been about our being present for and thriving in every thought/feeling/sensation of that being.
When we ‘do’, we dull. We dull ourselves to what it means to ‘be’, because we don’t pause long enough from ‘doing’ to experience the true art of ‘being’. Of being human.
And that’s where the chronically ill and disabled excel. We’ve been told that since we cannot ‘do’ we have no voice; no place at the table. And through the pain of that experience and the deep physical, emotional and spiritual challenges faced, we rise like Phoenixes from the ashes, shed of the title of ‘human doing’ and born again into the original light of existence: of living as a human being.
So how disabled are the disabled really, when the greatest disability is to value doing over being? How can you label those more present in this existence as lesser, when they offer the deepest insights into what it truly means to be a human being? This is the greatest trick ever played on humanity and we all fall for it until we are forced to pause through illness (of all types) and ‘dis’ability.
So no. We aren’t lesser.
The only real ‘dis’ability is that of not being present in this human experience. Of focusing on doing (what society imposes and demands of you) instead of being (what life and your soul itself ask of you). And the chain holding you back is ableism, and it’s time to release it.