gozzterLeave a Comment on Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up.

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up.

Age does nothing to disguise embarrassment I’m afraid. Being caught unaware in this time of information overload is itself awkward I suppose, but more so if the embarrassand is otherwise sound in mind, if not in body -or Age.

Disability has long been a stand-in for evil, or monstrosity; a visual equivalent for unacceptable other: them! Think of Shakespeare’s villainous Richard lll and his deformity (and although portrayed as a hunchback with a withered arm, was more likely to have had scoliosis: a lateral spinal curvature). Or think of more the contemporary depiction of disability in horror movies, many of which stereotype the disfiguratively impaired people as seeking retribution, revenge for not being accepted in mainstream society; for not being seen as valuable in other ways that perhaps matter more… And then there is one of my favourite but sad stories of misunderstanding and disability: Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

When I was young, the only reason to go to horror movies was to be frightened, not to wonder about why the abnormalities of the frightening characters were so disturbing, so menacing, so macabre. I doubt if any of my friends thought any differently -well, except for my best friend Teddy.

One his legs was shorter than the other, so he walked with a limp. And, if I looked more closely, I noticed that he often twisted his shoulders to stay balanced when he walked; it was minimal I suppose, but he pointed it out to me one day when we were walking down to the little ice cream  place on Osborne street to buy sodas and listen to the jukebox. Otherwise, we didn’t talk about it much; we didn’t have to -we were friends.

After we finished high school, we both enrolled in the local university; Teddy majored in psychology, and me… well, in as many different courses as I could manage without having to pick a major. I didn’t have the slightest idea where I was heading in life; Teddy did, though: he wanted to know the reason people were so fascinated with horror and so likely to feel disgusted with those who had visible deformities.

Perhaps, unlike many disabled people of the time, Teddy wanted to know why society reacted so adversely to deformity -was it fear of difference, or merely curiosity? But it turned out that Teddy had a more unique curiosity of his own. I only found this out near the end of term, when we met for coffee in one of the university’s coffee shops.

He leaned over the table as if he didn’t want anybody else to hear; but maybe it was the noise that surrounded us -it had been hard to carry on a normal conversation without shouting at each other. “What if I told you that I have a similar reaction to ableism as able-bodied people have for disability…?”

I had never heard him use the term ‘ableism’ in all the years I’d known him; maybe it didn’t exist then. “What do you mean, Teddy?” I was ready to defend my never having thought of myself as  ‘able’: I wore glasses, and was short and not particularly good at sports. Teddy was one of those who always stood up for me if I was picked last, and only reluctantly, for any pick-up baseball games in the summer. He was forgiven for his erratic base-running ability because he was a good pitcher and a devastatingly powerful batter. He used to point out that I could run like the wind and stole bases like a thief and he wanted me on his team.

“I’d never heard the term before,” he explained, trying to be heard over the noise in the coffee shop and yet still be discreet. “One of the post-docs used it in a seminar she was giving. I’m not sure whether she just made it up, but at any rate she said it meant the prejudice that the normal able-bodied people have against those with disabilities. She had a withered arm, so I’m not surprised she was picked to give the lecture…”

I was surprised at the suggestion that she might have been picked by the professor to give the lecture as an exemplar: to judge how the class would react to her disability and not because of her expertise in the matter. I shook my head slowly in disbelief. “Come on Teddy, do you really think that was why she was picked?”

Unusually for him, he frowned at my naïveté. “What world have you been living in G? How many people do you see in wheelchairs as department heads? How many people with obvious unsightly deformities are picked to give lectures, or to be spokespeople for companies?”

His eyes narrowed -something he’d never done with me. “I need to do something about that,” he said, leaning even closer to me so he didn’t have to shout. “I’m tired of horror movies that scare us with deformities; movies that almost never use disabled people as the heroes. It’s time we reversed it on occasion so we could see disabilities as assets… Sometimes anyway,” he was quick to add.

But for some reason I began to see him less and less after that, and eventually, not at all.

Looking back at those years, I can see the truth of what Teddy was telling me; cultural norms change, but only slowly. But then, in that restaurant, and in the flower of our youth, it came as a surprise. I suppose that it would though -except for Teddy’s almost invisible physical disabilities, I would never have seen many people in the public eye to contrast with how most of us lived our lives; because those with disabilities -or deformities as we might have called them then- were seldom in charge of anything I might have noticed. There was no internet yet, and no backlash against what we have come to call DEI. It was the 1960ies in Canada and we were young and sure we could change things if they seemed unjust or prejudicial.

Teddy died in a motorcycle accident before he finished his degree; his disability had become more obvious and he had started walking with a cane; but despite that, he told everybody that disability didn’t really matter. Some of his friends I met at his memorial service weren’t surprised, though: he had started to drink heavily.

He needed to prove that he was still the Teddy they’d come to know: a fearless champion of disability rights; an enableist he would call himself and never stopped trying to show how he could still do everything his friends could -although, increasingly, he couldn’t.

I still miss Teddy, you know -especially now that I am older and am certainly not capable of competing with my younger self. But Teddy was right: it doesn’t really matter, and if disability appears, and if that’s how I am described by others- it was him who taught me years ago that I am still valuable -at least to me…  

, , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close