My Offline Social Life In a Nutshell
I kneel in my garden You bend over in yours I am weeding zucchini You are watering corn
Staff talk to each other They talk to you and to me You and I don’t talk to each other But sideways-glancing, we see
[Image description: Large field, of plants, there’s a weeded spot that’s mostly just dirt, I’m kneeling down pulling weeds, you can’t really see my face.]
Most of my in-person social interaction works like this. It’s as much an artifact of the developmental disability system I am forced to live in to survive, as it is an artifact of anything particular about me or the woman I wrote this about, who I have only met in this kind of context.
I owe my life to the DD system. I have given up so much to survive the DD system even at its best. Neither of these things can be ignored. Everyone who uses this system to survive, gives up things you may not be able to imagine. This should not inspire pity or a sense of sad inevitability -- “things have to be like this, it’s too bad” -- but outrage and love and common humanity. This is an area where people don’t really differ from each other in anything but shape. Don’t kid yourself that we’re some kind of second-tier human beings who innately can take this because we’re not quite as real as you and don’t feel it. Most of us spend our whole lives shoving our humanity into boxes to survive and it’s never enough to please the forces that push us in that direction. We feel it. It always comes out in one way or another. All of us. Even those of us in hiding from ourselves.
I’m nervous about telling you the price we pay to be here. I feel like i’m revealing a dangerous secret. I feel like, in a system that is taking the place of something much worse, a system I need for survival, a system under threat right now, is not something I should be openly criticizing. But if it continues without change, with everyone simply saying we’re lucky it exists -- which we are, but that’s not the whole story. And without people knowing the whole story, we try to cram our souls into boxes. Our souls eventually object.
Meanwhile we often try to connect with each other indirectly rather, as described in the poem.
[If you want more on why and how our souls object, see this post, It’s long. But thorough..]
