6:17am October 10, 2010

“

To put it bluntly – because this need is as blunt as it gets – we must have our asses cleaned after we shit and pee. Or we have others’ fingers inserted in our rectums to assist shitting. Or we have tubes of plastic inserted inside us to assist peeing or we have re-routed anuses and passers so we do it all into bags attached to our bodies.

These blunt, crude realities. Our daily lives. Yeah, I know it ain’t exactly sexy. Not the images we’re trying to get across these days.

The difference between those of us who need attendants and those who don’t is the difference between those of us who know privacy and those who don’t. We rarely talk about these things, and when we do the realities are usually disguised in generic language or gimp humor. Because, let’s face it: we have great shame about this need. This need that only babies and the “broken” have.

And because this shame is so deep, and because it is perpetuated even by our own movement when we emphasize only the able-ness of our beings, we buy into that language that lies about us and becomes part of our movement, and our movement dances over the surface of our real lives […]. Because we don’t want to say this need that shames us out loud in front of people who have no understanding of the unprivate universe we live in, even if that person is a disabled sister or brother. We don’t want to say out loud a basic truth: that we have no place in our bodies (other than our imaginations) that is private.

[…]

But if our shame tells us that our needs lack dignity, that we lack dignity, then the next thing we hear our shame say is that it is more dignified to die than to live with these basic needs that take away our privacy and seem like such a burden.

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