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9:31am September 2, 2013

Impaired

Some kinds of communication problems are hard to explain.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I encountered this person who perfectly embodied a trait that bothered me in a certain autism forum.

She spoke with a sense of brittle frailty.  In hindsight, it reminds me of another woman, one I met in real life. She and a number of other women from a DD group home got on a disability van with me, and the conversation turned to how the driver’s late brother had had cerebral palsy.  Everyone expressed great pity for the whole concept of having CP. The driver made me want to smash my head into something by saying it is okay, everything’s fine, he doesn’t suffer anymore, he’s dead. But that’s not the point here.

So throughout the conversation, the woman kept holding up her hand, which had a very slight tremor, cradling it protectively in her other hand as if it was a poor poor thing that needed to be pitied and nourished, and said, “I have cerebral palsy in my hand, see?"  People kept ignoring her so she kept injecting more and more brittle frailty into her voice.

So back to the turn of the millennium and the autistic woman. So whenever she talked about her disabilities, that brittle frailty went into her voice.  I don’t know how, but it was even possible to pick up on it over the Internet.

And for some reason that tone peaked whenever she said the word "impaired”.  It’s not that I have any problem with the word. But somehow whenever she said she was visually impaired, or had multiple impairments, that brittle frailty went up to eleven.

But I had a lot less words for things back then. So I would have conversations like this:

Me: People on that forum seem much more impaired than people here, if you know what I mean.

Someone:  No.  I don’t know what you mean.

Me:  You know what I mean? Im-PAAAIRED.

Someone:  No I really don’t think they’re any more impaired than we are.

Me:  But I mean they’re more… IMPAIRED.

Someone: They’re not. I really don’t know what you are talking about.

I was getting frustrated. The other person was getting annoyed and slightly hostile, because they didn’t see why I kept saying something untrue . 

But really when I said “impaired”, I didn’t mean the actual meaning of the word.  I meant that weird brittle frailty that one woman had in her voice when she said the word.

And this has been the source of more miscommunication than you’d believe.