3:26pm December 18, 2011

Across The Divide part six

[This is Part Six of Across The Divide, a long article I’m breaking up into sections so it’s more manageable.  Please read the parts in order so it will make sense. Here are the links to the other parts:  Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six (you are here), Part Seven, Part Eight.]

Most people believe that the barrier I stare across is only within myself.  I used to think so too, before I had a reliable way to communicate my thoughts.  I used to liken it to glass walls around me with all kinds of prisms, distortions, and reflections:  I could use words, often with great simulated skill, but could barely ever use words based even loosely on my thoughts.

But even then I knew the answer to my communication problems was finding someone enough like me that they could “get in the back door” instead of peering in through cracks in the boarded up windows in the front.  That has proved more accurate than I ever dreamed.  I now have several such people in my life. With one of them we are so attuned to each other that our best communication is effortless and nonverbal.  When I am isolated and in pain and confused I can still sense her existence and she can pick up my distress without either of us saying a word.  It’s a level of intimacy(**) that I never dared hope for.  Ever.

So I stare across the divide to see you, but she’s always on the same side of it that I am.  Even when everything is chaos, even when everything disappears.  And even at times like now, when I could not get any action across the divide, there are plenty of people on the same side with me who can sense where I am, and I them – like Larry B. at the conference.  That tells me there’s more than my impairments at work here.

Certainly those impairments exist, as I’ve outlined them while writing this.  They  prevent certain kinds of action, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. This is real.

But other people, whether they share my diagnostic labels or not, often have impairments that contribute just as well to that gap.  They, too, are trapped, but they don’t always know it because there are so many of them on their own side of the wall. Their thoughts are limited to certain kinds of idea, which restrict their ability to experience the world through their senses and distorts information coming in and out. Their conception of time, neurologically and culturally, places certain limits around their conscious experience of the world(***).  They often have trouble detecting that I express myself nonverbally at all, except in the small range of ways that our nonverbal communication overlaps.  And they can have even worse trouble detecting my nonverbal communication in areas where seemingly overlapping behavior has different or even opposite meanings(****).

But society warps it all:  I am impaired. Even my abilities are purely impairments. They are strong. Even their impairments are really strengths. Nobody looks at the fact that my abilities and impairments are inseparable sides of the same coin – and so are theirs.  Unfortunately this kind of warpage is so strong that even when you point out the biases involved, people act like you’re just saying it to make people feel good, and relegate these statements to the same rubbish bin that cutesy euphemisms like “specially challenged” and “diffability” belong in.  That’s the effect of living in a society where people take thoroughly distorted ideas about disability to be real and unbiased. And where even most people who work for a less biased society can’t imagine the full extent of what such a society would look like, and therefore add in too many aspects of this one when they try to imagine it.  And don’t even know they’re doing that.

But as far as I can tell, the two-way nature of the divide is far more real than the one-sided way most people imagine it. When I look out across the divide, I’m not just staring over an abyss formed by my motor and communication impairments.  I’m also looking at the very commonplace communication impairments that put most people on that other side.  If it were only my own impairments at fault, there would be nobody standing over here with me. For most of my life there wasn’t, and I imagined myself trapped by my own body alone even as I was also weirdly certain that a person enough like me could break the spell.  Now that I know plenty of people enough like me, it’s obvious that to get a gap this wide requires both me and people unlike me.

(**) Completely non romantic, she’s in a monogamous relationship with a wonderful guy who swears she and I were separated at birth or something… maybe with the use of a time machine given our slight age gap.  Our intimacy is social, emotional, experiential, sensory, cognitive, everything but romantic or sexual.

(***) I’d be incapable of writing this right now under the linear conception of time held by most people in the cultures around me.  My sense of time, or lack thereof, contributes heavily to the way I can pull together lots of shifting and changing experiences like this. It’s not something I know how to explain though. It just is.

(****) I will never forget the time a reporter wrote that when she entered my apartment, I walked to the other side of the room and looked out the window as if she wasn’t there.

If someone like me had been in the room, they would have immediately noticed several things:  That my walking across the room was triggered by the reporter’s entry into the room.  That I was not only looking out the window, but in a way looking everywhere except the reporter.  That the way my back was turned signaled a constant wariness directed in exactly the direction of the reporter.  That rather than showing no emotion, my entire body was stiffened with barely suppressed terror.

They would notice all that instantly as it was happening, even if they were only looking peripherally. They would have seen it in my movements, heard it in the sound of my feet on the floor, felt it viscerally. They would conclude without having to think about it, that my actions showed a great awareness of the reporter’s presence, and were entirely in reaction to that presence and my terror of it.  They would be completely accurate about this.

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