I have been reading The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride (Brazos Press), releasing October 12. When I signed up for the launch team, I was not sure what to expect. Certainly I did not expect such a profound emotional journey into deep places I have not visited for a long time. I cannot simply write fluffy things about this book without disclosing the journey of my life that has been taken because of it.
Dr. McBride writes about the importance of accepting our bodies as the vehicles of the expression of selfhood. This resonates in my head-space, and yet there are difficulties with my ability to practice it. Were I in a room with her, I would think myself able to discuss this. On the other hand, discussing it at the dinner table with my husband, who is intimately familiar with me and with my reasons for these difficulties, brought rivers of tears to my eyes.
I have been blind from infancy. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing adults who were close to me whisper to strangers, “She’s blind,” in order to explain something about me. I have no doubt that they did not mean to create shame about me. They were trying not to draw the attention of the world to me. But the whispered nature of the conversation made me feel that blindness was a dirty word. My response to any of this dirty-word feeling where blindness was concerned was to “tune it out,” to go away from it in my mind. So what if I was blind. There was part of me that was perfectly good. Why can’t you pay attention to that me? Only that part got smaller and smaller and smaller, because people kept refusing to pay attention.
McBride encourages the reader to reclaim the body that has been dissociated from by saying, “I am my body.” The impact of this in terms of disabilities is important.
When I was a child in the 1970s, the term used to describe people with disabilities was “handicapped.” By the time I entered college in 1990, the term had changed to people with disabilities.” In the educational system it was acceptable to use the phrase “special needs.” Ten years later, person-first language was demanded and “special needs” began to go away. A group of people who did not want to be identified as disabled began to identify as “differently abled.”
Today, person-first language is largely frowned on, even by people who once demanded it. People with disabilities have built their identities around disability so that it is no longer politically correct to say, “a person with a disability” but “a blind person”. “Neurodiverse” has become standard in places where I often read “differently abled” twenty years ago.
During all this time that terminology was changing, I was diagnosed with four additional health conditions. A diagnosis tells doctors how to communicate about my symptoms. It doesn’t say much about how long I have been living with the symptoms and impact of the condition. This is where McBride’s discussion of embodiment is important matters.
During my childhood, much attention was drawn in my mind to my blindness. I received all kinds of conflicting messages about its impact on my life and my relationships. In fact, for many years blindness was me and I was a “blind person”. It felt to me as if there was nothing else that anyone cared about. I may as well have been nothing but a giant blind eye, perhaps with a brain attached.
But it wasn’t true. I was, and am, a whole body. Wholeness must mean that I am more than my blindness. It must include my other disabilities, my hopes and dreams, my enjoyments, my experiences… In fact, I must reject the phrase “I see with my fingers. For I do see with my eyes, however little the sight is. Embodiment means that I value the experience of my body and desire that it be valued by others. My fingers are not eye-substitutes but fingers that have their own experiences.
I have realized in reading this book that for much of my life I have been working to disentangle myself from the sense of being bound up in the I-am-my-blindness narrative that society has dictated to me. Blindness can be seen and it is easy to define a person by what one can see. Since some of my other conditions have begun to have more significant impacts on my life, I have found it important to direct attention away from blindness if possible. I don’t have a desire to hide blindness but I am used to living with it. Instead of hiding from my blindness, I have made a point to draw external attention to my other needs when they are important.
For several years I was unable to remain in the sanctuary at church when handbells were played because of migraines that were triggered by the sound of the bells. Some people thought that I left because the bells hurt my guide dog’s ears. I explained that the problem was me and what it was. I felt the explanation was important in case I should ever need medical attention.
When I learn to embody all of me, I can unlearn the habit of expecting myself to do so many things I am not medically able to do. It will take time but if I learn to hear from my child body what I would have known if I had understood the same symptoms I experience as an adult, I will learn how to treat the adult respectfully. This makes sense if I think that I would never ask the blind child to read more than she was able. She had proper support. I am sad that I asked the asthmatic child to breathe more than she was able. I didn’t know there was an asthmatic child. I only thought there was a blind child.
I also free my senses to do all that they were meant to do. My ears and fingers are no longer just substitute eyes. They are free to enjoy music fully and revel in textures. Certainly I can still employ them as assistant senses when I need them, but they are no longer slaves to my eyes that have a disability. They function just like anyone else’s ears and fingers most of the time, and there is nothing wrong with my pointing this out when people romanticize the ways that I use them.
Order your book. I hope it is as helpful for your reflections as it has been for me.
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