Writing
This Ability: Parables and True Stories
We use the
expression scattered skills a lot of the time when talking about
disability, and I have come to embrace that idea. Some people
are good at math. I am not. I have a good spatial sense. Others
do not. I have begun to think about this spectrum of human skills,
all the way from Kim Peek to the dullness we call normality as
the true range of human ability. In our technological future we
will perhaps ameliorate this somewhat with electronic fixes, but
in the meantime we are left with the delightful variation that
is humanity, the confines of our biology and the cultural attempts
to constrain our minds.
The stories
in this collection represent more than just tear-jerking accounts
of overcoming adversity, although I've told a few of those too.
I'm more interested in exploring the potential of what we consider
to be dis and ability through characters who are constrained by
circumstance and societal expectation even as they fight against
those limits.
Rather than
use this description to label these characters further, I would
say instead that the reach of the human intellect, the intransigence
of human dignity, the rough multiplicity of circumstances with
which we are confronted, are no match for the fortitude and insight
of the one who wants to escape.
No hardened
criminal fought harder to carve a prison wall than someone trapped
by a story about their abilities and no escapee on a welcoming
shore felt more a sense of achievement than one whose diagnosis
was stretched and then broken.
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