Who Are You - A Cripple, or a Man? How About Both?

I believe it's important to not "be" your handicap - in fact, I spent decades denying I even had one. We are all more than the fact of our handicaps, and that is completely as it should be. After all, we want to enjoy life in the same manner everyone does - except perhaps the politicians. We want to be active - sports, hiking, enjoying our friends, or our kids, just as everyone else does. And it comes as no surprise to me that I wasn't the only clubby who tried to act as though I did not in fact have something that set me apart from "everybody else," whether I wanted it to or not. I learned very early that being different, especially among my peer group, was a ticket to being bullied, to humiliation, to rejection, to being relegated the outsider status I never sought. But there it is, isn't it? Everyone I have ever met, who has a handicap - obvious or invisible - has gone through some variation on this theme. And nearly all have confessed to me that the biggest hurdle they often face is their own internal battles, the internalizing of all that rejection and humiliation, of being if not told, then certainly being shown, that to be handicapped nearly anywhere in the world is to be "different."

Today, I have come to terms with the harder elements of this internal battle, this constant rupturing of the self I feel, from the self I deny. But in order to do that, I had to work very hard to realize that, in choosing to call myself a clubby, in choosing to spend a major portion of my life trying to help others whose handicaps have made life difficult, I was that different person the world made me out to be. Only now, I am in charge of that self. I do not hesitate to tell those who ask why I walk with a cane, or limp worse some days than others, or why I wear those huge shoes, that I am a clubby, and am more than willing to explain what that means, if they are truly interested in facing the truth along with me. Until I was willing to allow my self to be my handicap, as much as all the other things I want to and strive to be, I was not ever going to be a complete person, the person  in fact I am, different or not. And, true confession here, I have spent more than thirty years in therapy working to reintegrate all those aspects of myself, to reclaim my full self, handicap and all. And I am still working on that goal. Fact is, I suspect I will always be working on it.

But I have also learned something else along the way - everyone, perhaps with the exception of Buddha, has a handicap. If you spend time truly observing people, something I have spent much of my life engaged in, both at the professional level, and just because people fascinate me, you will sooner or later spot their handicap. It might in fact be obvious - cane, wheelchair, prosthetic, a limp, - or it may be very subtle, say, an inability to actually listen to what another person is saying, or, bigotry, or intolerance of people who they believe are slower, or who think differently, etc. A handicap, when seen in the manner the word is used in sport, as in horse racing, for example, simply means that there are differentials in advantage that must be factored into the ability of the various participants to fully compete on a level playing field, as it were. Us clubbies, just as with others with physical and mental handicaps, don't really have a level playing field, do we? And that is why I feel so strongly that we do indeed need to be as willing to "be" our handicap to the same degree we choose to be our other aspects - our work, our sport, our friends and family. Our clubby selves need to be fully integrated into our lives. Then, and in my view, only then, are we able to be fully and truly who we are.