Ever
since I was a kid I’ve heard certain cripples referred to as
“high-functioning.”
Every
cripple wants to be thought of as high-functioning, even though nobody knows
exactly what it means. But it sure sounds nice, doesn’t it? People take you a
lot more seriously when they think you’re high-functioning. It separates you
from the lowly cripples. It puts you among the cripple elite.
So
I’ve thought a lot over the years about whether or not I can rightfully call
myself high-functioning. But I still don’t know. I guess the problem is I don’t
know the calculation for determining which cripples are high-functioning. It
seems to me that the way this is done by comparing one cripple to another.
But
even when I do that, I still don’t know where I stand. Because what if you
compare me to some brawny cripple who’s won a zillion gold medals in the
Paralympics? In that case, I always come out looking like Tiny fucking Tim.
Is that fair? It’s like comparing apples to cerebral palsies. Maybe the only fair
way to determine if a cripple is high-functioning is to compare them just to cripples
of the same genre. But is that fair? It might distort the concept of
high-functioning all to hell. I mean, if you compare two cripples who have Lou
Gehrig’s disease, then the one who blinks is high-functioning.
It
looks to me like there is no officially recognized standard for determining
which cripples deserve to be deemed high-functioning. It’s all subjective. So
I’ll stick to comparing myself only to cripples within my own genre. Because
according to a lot of dumbass doctors, cripples of my genre are supposed to die
before we get very far into adulthood. And I’m still alive, so I guess that
makes me high-functioning.
