3:18am July 19, 2012

➸ Don't look past my disabled body - love it

dailydares:

Really great piece on body image:

The notion of “looking past” disability to somehow see “the real person” is one I have come to find deeply offensive. I spent my teenage years thinking that I needed to find someone who could ignore my physical body and see my “attributes” - my intelligence and humour, my mad knitting skillz. I thought that the only logical way for someone to find me attractive would be for them to ignore what I look like. It didn’t occur to me until years later that my body is also an attribute.

This is beautiful.

I can’t articulate why. But I strongly associate this issue with one that plagued my own adolescence: People stating constantly that they wanted the “real me” back. Or that they could “see the real me coming back” if I was suddenly able to do something for a couple hours that I couldn’t normally.

My adolescence involved a slowish but drastic “regression”, they called it, as if a human being can actually grow backwards. In many ways, it was more the emergence of the “real me” than the hiding of it. Because I was losing all the abilities I’d used to, if not exactly pass, at least get passed off by others. Not as normal, but as things other than what I was. And I was gaining abilities in my real areas of strength, but nobody noticed that.

Anyway people’s desire to get the real me back was devastating for me as a self-conscious teenager. First, their idea of the real me had always been imaginary. But when I stopped being capable if looking like the imaginary person in their heads, they let that imaginary person keep growing year after year, along an imaginary developmental trajectory.

So I was having to compete with essentially a ghost. A girl in their heads who never existed and never could exist. As I fell further behind, they only ever encouraged me to develop faster and faster.

Nobody. Not one person. Ever told me that who I was, was okay. Even if I stayed the same or lost more abilities. It was the one thing that I needed to hear more than anything in the world and not a single person ever said it. And nobody ever told me that living arrangements existed outside institutions for people like me. So I never thought of it either and spent my entire adolescence miserable to the point of suicide. I was more aware than anyone else, that I could never be who they imagined. And it took me years to be able to not be repulsed by who I really was.

And there is some sort of very deep connection between what I experienced and what she did. But for the life of me I can’t explain it or get my head around what it is.

Notes: