Of Disability and Ambition

Wellness is not suborned to ambition, but is ambition itself. I’ve been in mind of this lately because I teach disability studies and travel widely as a disability contrarian, if I do say so myself. Wellness is ambition and not an abstraction. By this I mean that wellness differs from the dichotomous “illness vs. cure” trap disability advocates often fight–for you can be “well” though you’re blind and deaf, have MS, or a thousand other life function obstacles. This is elementary to many people with disabilities as we have necessarily learned how to live. By “many” I mean the fortunate of us, those with accommodations and prospects. These are not guaranteed and make no mistake about it, the right wing is doing everything it can to unfund disability social security. ABC’s infamously “disability-hostile” tabloid program “20/20” is poised to regurgitate all the histrionic and inaccurate characterizations of disability fraud that NPR has shamelessly unleashed in recent weeks. Accommodations and prospects are hard to acquire if you are a person who has entered the kingdom of disability as an older citizen. But I digress. Wellness is not about being cured but it is about choosing to live with dignity and spirit.

 

The boxer Mike Tyson once said “I don’t know how to live in the middle of life” which is a poignant thing for an athlete to admit and to which we may add “it’s always the middle of life” and yes, knowing how to live must have ambition which is wellness. It is a decision, then a practice, and requires only its own commitment. It is the story of Siddhartha. But it’s also a disability story.

 

I wish more disability activists could say this. My general impression is that people with disabilities are so caught in the business of declaring they’re not inspiring they lose the chance to share the acquired and hard to learn facets of living well. Instead we undermine ourselves, say with cynicism we’re just “super crips” (putting off all considerations of human success, deflecting them) allowing the ghost of Tiny Tim to rob us of all language having anything to do with emotional intelligence and social success. This isn’t good. And it isn’t fair to ambition.