My identity needs water. My identity is a dried turd. A 16th century one. Identity from “idem” to be the same. I’m the same as you. I’m not without my qualities but they’re significant only insofar as someone else also has them. My identity is troubled by this. It scratches and moans at all hours of the night. I’ve never met anyone like me. If I claim an identity aren’t I by the very act claiming a fantasy?
Well yes. Oscar Wilde said it: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Given what Wilde endured in the name of originality who’d want to go beyond mere identity?
This is, in effect, what a free thinking human being should strive for: life beyond identity, not a sameness, a politburo, a glee club, a political party. This is scary. Institutions are against it. Churches, universities, corporations….Who dares to be naked?
Rousseau said: “I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.”
Different frightens every school child. It scares the pants off of me. I want desperately to look like you.
Disability is interesting in this regard since no two people experience any disabling condition the same way. No. Two. People. In this way disability is not an identity. Disability is an enforcement.
Einstein wrote: “We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”
Consciousness is predisposed to a sea sickness—staggering between separateness as ideation and the desire for sameness in the name of affection. Disability identity is enforced separateness (the social construction of normalcy) and a longing for others like us.
But no matter your disability there’s no one like you.
A disability by any other name would smell as sweet.
In this way I can’t be scripted by disablement. The name can’t help. The affections for likeness are fictive.
Audre Lorde, one of my favorite poets wrote: “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”
Planet of the Blind 