First published on Disability.gov For 70 years she put up with his (sometimes volcanic) rumblings. He doted on her with diamonds, and was a poorer father for it. The youngest of 5 much older siblings, she was babied into being passive and timid. He was a blustering bad boy who loved control; a lifelong natural at most things mechanical. He took seriously his duties as a man, a spouse, […]
My balance, isn’t. So when I head straight toward the bushes at the entrance to my building it isn’t surprising. Bushes are a trigger in picturing my first (and only) experience as a new MSer in an MS support group. Recommended by my neurologist, the group experience was meant to help me cope with the way-past-due-diagnosis of my disease. Instead, it freaked me out. Walkers, wheelchairs, canes, crutches – and me, invisibly […]
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people. Wowee zowie! There’s still a long way to go in making people aware of invisible disabilities. And that so many of us experience […]
Speaking from a disabled woman’s point of view, living the “lib lie” in relationship simply doesn’t work. The “lib lie” I’m talking about is putting career before relationship, being damned if I’ll make cacciatore, or being complimented for how I look. Where was my head all these years. I’ll tell you where: in the conference room, the kitchen, and in front of the mirror. Truth be told, I like making […]
In the modern age, long past the time Aesop and Burl Ives were telling stories, hybrids thrived. One such unlikely combination was the grasshopper and the ant. Now, you would think that being such behavioral opposites their paths would never cross. You’d be wrong. Somewhere in the reeds and weeds all the bugs were doing their thing. Beetles rolled balls of doo-doo around in circles. Bees started happy […]
The autopilot in us keeps us so far from making choices that our lives go by like getting to work — can’t even remember how we got there. I tell myself that if life wasn’t so full and whirling I’d be more of a participant instead of bystanding But getting in “the flow” isn’t singular and it isn’t the same for each of us. While I suspect that lots of us […]
Lots of us with disabilities, hidden or not, feel as if we’re a burden. Needing assistance with basic tasks, like getting from one place to the other, feels like a loss of independence. Depending on our experience with that quality, a loss like that can be emotionally upsetting. Thus, we want and need to believe that relationships are unaffected. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, swindlers were able […]
ilikebeingsickanddisabled 