Shock

It's amazing how ingrained some things are...you think you've got a balanced healthy self image of yourself, impairments and all, and then blam! You realize that you have some serious internalized abelist thinking going on ( I didn't *call* it internalized ableist thinking in 1981, but that's what it must have been.)

There is no video, or film of my childhood years, not because of a purposefull decision not to film me because of my impairments, but simply because my parents felt the equipment a luxury. There are many many still photographs of me in my youth, but no video until a local tv appearance at age 18, where I only saw myself move for a moment, since the quiz show format had us all seated behind a wall...

A year and a half later, turned out the play I was in in 1981 was being videotaped in black and white. The Leading Lady was up for the Irene Ryan Award and had to submit her work. The tape was shown to all of us after sending a copy off.

I was stunned. Shocked... and then shocked again at the thought that went through my head "...Well, no *wonder* no one's dating you if *that's* what your moving gait looks like."

I had never seen myself walk as an adult. Until that video. My friends and family were much more accustomed to my movements and didn't think anything repulsive about them, because they'd seen me move every day...but I had not.

It seemed somewhat Quasimodo to me. A much less bent version of the Hunchback...almost straight but-not-quite.


I gave myself a mental smack and told myself not to let it matter, knowing that if I foccussed on that difference at all it would take necessary focus away from social friendships and academic success which were very important to me at the time. My weight was also beginning to be a factor as well but the main diference was the gait...

That's when I dismissed my gait. Put it in a box. And refused to think about myself visually in motion. Still pics were fine, and could even be objects of vanity or personal pride, if the clothes were good, or the photograph was well done.

Later, in the middle of a women's studies group I was briefly involved in a woman with impairments said that the way we all stayed sane was to become, in most instances "a floating head." Women whose impairments were only physical, she said, tended to value gifts of the spirit or the mind more, and stop identifiying with themselves almost completely from the neck down. This was wrong, she said, because before we could expect others to value us correctly, we had to add the value of the body to what we already admired about ourselves.

I gradually came to see value in my physical self, but the springboard for that value should have been internal, and it wasn't...In other words when someone else saw value in it, then I could invest in that value and take it for myself.

The small piece of positive body value I can give myself is that: Once that first value was shown me from the outside, I have not surrendered it, and it now comes from inside.

My weight, yes, that's a different thing, but that's not what I'm discussing here. I'm discussing the differences made by my impairments...Those all now have some experience or vision or value to them that is positive, part of the armor used when some stranger takes the time to pity me or insult me. (Although my sharp tongue is become the most dangerous weapon against too much pity or disrespect.)

That's why I believe I missed out by not having a disabled woman role model in my youth and teens. If I'd had a realistic goal to shoot for, valuing my entire physical spectrum of motion, gait, size experience, might have been simpler.