We Consider Disability “Beautiful” Briefly and Only When It Trends

Will I fight that? Yes but…

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I love everything about wanting to grow into my body safely and enjoy time in it… despite the weird truce agreement we’ve reached of “you will always suffer”…

But all ‘beauty and lifestyle’ branding isolates an entire group of people who struggle in both categories.

We consider disability “beautiful” briefly and only when it trends (I could walk a runway with my scars but it would have a shelf life, in theory. Will I fight that? Yes but… A model with one scar feels revolutionary. A model with a Fifth Element level of cyborg elements? Let’s believe it when we make it).

And ‘lifestyle’ glam presumes that all we are ‘living’ to be healthy… when I’m over here Sansone-ing like the undead.

As I’m in recovery, soon- in a few weeks- I’ll be I wanting to return to movement that I love (outside of barre, of course). For me, that has always been Leslie Sansone walks (since I was a new, young mom many decades ago), and then something with weights. Anything with weights, because in another life, I would be a gym bro but with a broader range of conversation.

Because of my joints (and attention span?), I only do 10 minute weight workouts, normally, because I’m doing them at home… But I love the very gender-trope dude workouts where you’re doing arms and chest, and laying on your back (my bed) and pretending it’s a bench, and my favorite YouTube guy is swole and Scottish (the latter part being my dream man, not the former).

Exercising my “abs” is the most convoluted process that it should count for college credit. Literally almost anything “traditional” that involves lying on my back throws my back out in some way that impacts my week for days. I pretend I can think my way through it and be normal… and then I pay for it.

So why keep doing something that clearly just isn’t working for me?

Even though I love teaching abdominal workouts in class for others, I can mostly survive “standing abs” the best, and have to tread lightly on anything that bends forwards, even when I’m not on post-spinal-surgery-protocol of no BLT (bend, lean, twist… not the sandwhich). I never seem to outgrow the “no BLT”? Not truly.

I dance and pretend I do… then I can’t walk for two days and repeat again. But here’s the thing to sit with (for myself and many of us stuck mostly sitting): If we DON’T do something physical in our fifth-element of choice… We wake up feeling even worse.

I lock up like the Tin Man, and open my eyes to whisper my JoJo “no one has made this dramatic of a change yet” catchphrase that is, and always will be, the unoriginal following: “I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus.”

I have lived my Regina George best-life yet? Nay… Therefore I say this statement on repeat with absolutely zero authority. I’m pretty sure being hit by a bus does not feel like this… So if you have any new ideas for my new “No one has made in my generation this extreme of a switch”… Please drop your contendors below.

To be honest (as talking about my laissez-faire non-workout routine is clearly riveting): I could work out arms all day… maybe because my legs and feet are where my strength mostly resides? My body knows what it needs to improve upon? Or just because- in my mind… I’m swole and Scottish?

Even when our bodies or pocket books aren’t limiting us from living like J.Lo… sometimes I’d just rather ‘live than lifestyle’?

(That one isn’t JoJo. That me.)

Vanity doesn’t motivate me, and in a sense… That’s actually a bad thing. Because I think if I was an Efron, I would get more done. But I want to keep movement in my life- even if by my own terms- in one way or another because my mind simply can’t sit with itself, even if my future is one with more sitting (who’s to say. Considering my left foot is still periodically going numb right now, I’m trying to prepare myself to be the OG director who creates from a cushion with a cane, including the Slovic accent).

I have a satin pillowcase… but I cannot train myself to sleep on my back like a corpse except for when I’m recovering from a surgery and can’t move. I now associate Aurora-sleeping with pain and portacaths and heart monitors and catheters. “Let us smother our faces with pillows at the end of a day!” (Aren’t steroid battles and anxiety-at-the-world enough for our already sleepless nights?)

The advice we give for being “well” makes most sick people feel unwell…

But it definitely leaves us out of the conversation too.

How many visual mediation apps can you name, for example, that include the Deaf population?

How many hospitals make announcements overhead, auditorally, but make sure the Deaf patient knows what’s happening shortly thereafter?

How many inpatient hospital stays are built purely upon the following words for nurses (who’s faultthis is not): “If you need me, press the button on the bed and call me.” (That button includes someone anwering back from the front desk and - I know from years of experience- not all nurses are made aware that there is a Deaf pstient on the floor and think you’re incredibly rude when you push the button but cannot discuss why through the intercom.)

In short, Deaf people have to read the words “just meditate with an app!” left and lifestyle right…

As if it’d be so easy to “just calm down”.

How can we grow safely into a body that doesn’t always feel very safe in the world?

“Calm down”, Medicine whispers… “Calm down.”

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