If you’re going to find happiness and contentment as a cripple, it helps to be the kind of person who likes being a non-conformist (and I don't mean in the religious sense).
You
don’t really have a choice in the matter. Sooner or later, your body and/or
brain are going to defy your commands and do whatever they damn well please
whether you like it or not. That’s how crippled bodies are. Eventually you’re
going to walk funny or talk funny or throw a big seizure at the most
inopportune time.
Your body is never going to
completely conform to the norm no matter how hard you try. So you might as well embrace being a non-conformist. I know that there are a
lot of fake non-conformists in the world. They conform to the standards that
are necessary to qualify for membership in whatever pack of non-conformists with whom they are conforming today.
But a lot of cripples are
natural born non-conformists. It’s easier to come to grips with that reality if you’re
a cripple who has no chance of passing as a vert (which is what I call people who
walk because it’s short for vertical). I haven’t walked since I was 17 years
old. And even before then the best I could maybe do was walk a little around a room if it was a small room and I was holding onto the walls.
So whenever I went out in
public, I didn’t even think about trying to tell my body to walk like a vert
because I knew it wouldn’t listen to me. It was going to play by its own rules.
I was destined to make a
mockery out of a lot of things just by being myself. To be ashamed of that was
to be ashamed of myself. So the only way I was ever going to learn to love my
crippled self was to love being a non-conformist. Because that’s what I am.
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