If we are fortunate, we will live to the age where we experience the inability to do things we used to do with ease. The process of aging teaches us all to be thankful for what we can still do, and hopefully an acceptance of what we are less and less able to do. Your insights about chronic illness onset are valuable, and perhaps have a lesson for those whose disabilities come later. It's hard to give up freedom of movement and thought, but being thankful for past gifts of life is one way to temper the sadness of our losses. Thankfulness for what we are still able to do is another.
But you understood without question and the impact isn't lost on you. You understand oppression from a different angle due to your own experiences. Oppression has many different faces. Social, physical, emotional. I imagine, in your own way, life has been a series of gains since you were young as well.
And losses. When I got sick, my address book went from a few hundred people (as happens with activists) to a handful immediately and I lost nearly everything my sense of identity stood upon. Our friend was talking about me in the group that gets the losses. Gains came later, reclaiming some of what was lost, but never reclaiming all of it. I had not recognized the pattern she made so clear because I've been entangled in it. So has she, at the other end of the spectrum. But she *saw the pattern*.
If we are fortunate, we will live to the age where we experience the inability to do things we used to do with ease. The process of aging teaches us all to be thankful for what we can still do, and hopefully an acceptance of what we are less and less able to do. Your insights about chronic illness onset are valuable, and perhaps have a lesson for those whose disabilities come later. It's hard to give up freedom of movement and thought, but being thankful for past gifts of life is one way to temper the sadness of our losses. Thankfulness for what we are still able to do is another.
Really it's my friend's insight. It practically knocked me over.
But you understood without question and the impact isn't lost on you. You understand oppression from a different angle due to your own experiences. Oppression has many different faces. Social, physical, emotional. I imagine, in your own way, life has been a series of gains since you were young as well.
And losses. When I got sick, my address book went from a few hundred people (as happens with activists) to a handful immediately and I lost nearly everything my sense of identity stood upon. Our friend was talking about me in the group that gets the losses. Gains came later, reclaiming some of what was lost, but never reclaiming all of it. I had not recognized the pattern she made so clear because I've been entangled in it. So has she, at the other end of the spectrum. But she *saw the pattern*.