Differently Disabled
For A long while after your achilles tendon explodes into individual strings like a new rope torn in half— the kind of injury that seems so improbable until it happens, and then seems unsettlingly inevitable—you don’t move at all. Toes kept above your nose, waited on for every meal, and clockwork pain that demands medication so good and so strong you have to scrape your name and address off the prescription bottle to ensure trash divers don’t come to find your pharmaceutical ground zero.
But eventually, awfully, you have to get up. People with intact limbs have lives and jobs and not you to get back to and it’s time to do some things for yourself. Who hurries past your crutches versus who offers up their seat on the bus become instant credits and debits for humanity. The moments of societal victory are extra sweet and endearing, the disappointments cold and outrageous, worthy of war and angry status updates. You are, as you have come to accept, a disabled person—it’s your right to be moderately taken care of by the physically capable.
And then you start to get better. Your tissues knit and swelling goes down and the walking aids fall away, and after all that, the pain subsides. And though it’s hard to admit—and harder to understand why—there’s a mourning process. Gone are the days of being served your meals and helped in the shower softly, not sexually, by your boyfriend. The moments of medically induced fuzzy euphoria are gone (or they should be—Advil is, tragically, usually enough at this point). And, finally, it’s your turn to give up your seat on the bus. You are not really disabled. Your injury was not that special, your circumstances not so dire, your needs not so important.
Like any humbling moment, this realization is uncomfortable. You’ve become so used to your temporarily disabled status that the “temporarily” part has withered away, much like your calf muscle. Crutches are appropriately named—you’ve leaned on this mini-trauma for months and healing suddenly feels abrupt and unjust.
It’s the rehabilitation no one warned you for—your re-entrance into regularity. You may find yourself overwhelmed with the need to pout. Give in just a little. Treat your mental recovery as carefully as your physical recovery. Take in a final moment of helplessness.
But then recover. Do the work, put on the fake smile, and reacquaint yourself with your old self. You’ll get used to it again. And the next time someone in need gets on the bus, you will be the first to give up your seat, and their smile will be earnest and warm, and it will feel good.
At least, better than Advil.
Differently Disabled
Thoughts by Danny Bracco
