As I became physically disabled over 30 years ago I was very aware of my reduced mobility, but mentally I was the same person as I was before. I saw my illness as most people do: negative.
But I didn’t feel that I would be imperfect or IN-valid somehow. For the first time in my life I had the thought that I had always got what I wanted.
It didn’t mean that I would have got everything I had dreamt of, but what was meaningful in terms of the continuity of life.
So, why did I get sick? I, who was never ill suddenly lied in a hospital hooked up to a breathing machine.
The new course my life had taken was splitting me for a long time:
I had a happy-go-lucky life before I got the disability and a life after that when I could take nothing for granted.
20 years after the turning point I couldn’t even look at the photo taken of myself before I became disabled.
One day, as I was trying to hide the photo somewhere, where it wouldn’t bother me, my whole attitude – the self-image my ego had created – appeared to be absurd. I couldn’t live so fragmented, as if my life would consist of two lives. I had one single life and everything was connected with everything else.
I took the picture and hang it up on the wall of the entry room, where I could see it at every turn.
From that moment my self-healing -process started. I experienced more and more clearly the thing I also mention in my text ‘Everything is Perfect’: in the 1980s I read a book written by an American doctor, in which he describes the phenomenal talent of some people to create a physical illness when they want to solve their mental problems.
There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to take action. In every action we take there is a lesson to learn, which leads our life forward and let us grow. The Bible says:
So, if God is for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8:28,31
Everyday Politics
With reduced mobility everything I was doing was therapy:
Sewing became occupational therapy, body exercise was physiotherapy, studying was not simply studying, but “vocational rehabilitation”.
In the beginning I didn’t like this classification, which seemed to be too technical. Gradually I understood that it made much sense:
I had become a part of the health care system, where politics is made on many levels. At its simplest politics is any targeted action to achieve certain kind of goal.
It was natural that precise expressions were formed to describe different activities, so that everyone knew what people were talking about. In that way everything was easier to structure and perceive. The expressions emphasized the goal the activity was aiming at. I understood that a prerequisite for my success was that I learned the language (of rehabilitation).
Learning to express myself clearly was the only way to win people to my side and help me reach my goals. I couldn’t speak, but a spoken word can take many forms. Writing was suitable for me.
The whole mankind needs rehabilitation. Not because of our deficiencies, but because in that way we can reach our full potential and become the value that inherently belongs to us.
Read also:
Everything is Perfect