Challenges

I was reading an answer to a question about autism on the Quora website and I encountered this phrase: internalized stigma. Our culture says many things about people who are different or disabled in some way. These attitudes that people have toward disabilities can be adopted by the disabled and can negatively influence their feelings about themselves. They can feel that they are somehow, because of their disability, "broken” or “second rate” or “defective.” 

But it also occurred to me that we are talking about physical issues. Each of us is a spirit that is inhabiting a physical body. That body will go through many changes over the course of its lifetime, from the helplessness of a baby to the helplessness of very old age. The spirit inside a body may also experience helplessness caused by injury, or disease, or congenital disorders.

There is a grown man who lives near me and on warm days he sits in a chair on his porch and blows bubbles. I have walked past his house a number of times and seen him on his porch blowing bubbles. Inside his damaged brain is a spirit that cannot view the world as the rest of us, and cannot express itself as the rest of us. The connections in his brain aren't wired for that, but the spirit inside him is as unbent, as unbroken, as the spirit inside each of us who consider ourselves as "whole." Our bodies function, our brains function, and we call ourselves normal. We fail to recognize that our bodies are normal now, at this point in time. Our brains are normal now, at this point in time. All it takes is an auto accident to disable us. All it takes is a blow to the head to change who we are for the rest of our life.

So perhaps we shouldn't focus so much on what we perceive as a disability, and instead try to keep in mind the vision of a shining flame. Because inside every living person is a spirit, and that spirit is here, living in a body, in order to experience certain things, in order to learn. The same is true of people who do not have recognizable disabilities. We're all here to learn. I don't know what each of us is here to learn, but I would guess that love and compassion and doing the right thing are at the top of the list, and that those qualities must apply to every one of us. You cannot be a loving person while loving one and hating another. You cannot be a compassionate person unless you have compassion for all of us.

These truths have been spoken many times, but as long as some of us don't "get it" then we will need reminders.