I wanted to thank all the commenters who have left me encouraging notes, and everyone who chimed in to the discussions over the past couple days. You can really tell when you struck that tuning fork just right, because everybody comes out to talk about it 🙂
There were also more than a couple people who expressed surprise/relief to find people who are facing the same issues they face every day. I wanted to encourage you all to keep talking about these things.
I started my blog mainly because our experiences are kept in the dark like this so often. It is considered inappropriate to discuss certain experiences, and pretty much anything involving disability falls into that column. It is a “private” matter. And even where it isn’t necessarily considered inappropriate, sometimes it seems out of place, talking openly about such personal things when most of the conversation focuses on the abstract, the theoretical.
Remember: the personal is political.
The more we speak up about our experiences, the more people we find who have gone through the same thing, and the more we can learn from each other, and discover exactly how common some of those experiences are — and thus, understand that those experiences are not our own personal failures, but the result of a society-wide approach to the issues we face.
And the more we speak up, the more other people, who don’t share those experiences, hear. The more information they have, straight from the people affected, rather than the (very limited) mainstream conversation that tends to exclude those people de facto. And thus the better understanding we can all form about these issues.
You are not obligated to speak. You can share exactly as much as you are comfortable sharing. But to those people who feel relief upon meeting another person who understands all of those “private” things that weren’t “relevant” to the conversation before: Speak up. I want to hear you. Start a blog. Comment on other people’s blogs. Make no secret of your day to day, minute-to-minute experiences, even when speaking with people in “real life.”
Don’t consider your condition a secret, or a severely personal matter, which doesn’t affect anyone else, and therefore interests no one else. Because a lot of us are interested. And their issues affect you. Don’t let that street stay one-way.
There are understandable circumstances where one would not want to be so open. I am trying to keep my disabilities as hidden as possible while searching and interviewing for jobs. Maybe a family member has a thing about the subject and you don’t want to rehash things over and over again. Maybe another person reacts negatively, or you sense that they would, and you don’t feel like dealing with that. That is all perfectly fine. But the oath of secrecy we are all made to take seems to extend to situations far, far beyond these. And I want to break down those barriers.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so satisfied in my life as when people step of the Google bus, or a link from another site, or whatever, to read my writing, and write to say that they have gone through the same thing and they had never heard anyone talk about it openly before. It gives me hope.
There are people out there right now who are going through the same things you face, every single day. And a lot of those people have no idea that there are other people out there going through those same things. Because we’re taught not to talk about it.
But maybe, if you talk about it, one of them will hear you. And their life will be a little bit easier, knowing that they aren’t the only ones.
Start talking.