3 Editors, 3 Bully Pulpits

By Barry Corbet
August 1997

In the room, the yellow dog comes and goes and not a word about Michelangelo. He’s fidgety because I’m spending a few weeks flat on my back to heal some skin, and he’s not getting his customary sport. Nor am I, although he deals with it better. Inside, outside, it’s all jake with him. Me? I’m suspended between two worlds.

The one to my right, seen through the wide-screen window next to my bed, is pure spectacle. By just turning my head, I can see the Continental Divide rising 6,700 feet above and Clear Creek Canyon falling 2,300 feet below. By craning my neck a little, I can see the edge of a prairie ocean that stretches to Nebraska and beyond.
This place has muscular architecture and matching moods — winter winds that roar like colliding trains, summer lightning that bites the tops off the ponderosas. The sunsets are splashy, chrome yellow and indigo fading to night, to moonset, to silence of snowfall. I hear coyotes, owls, the cheerful panting of my yellow dog. In this bare-bones bedroom, I live my bare-bones life. I watched Hale-Bopp from this window, and the damn dog snores.

That’s one world. The other is to my left where I see a crude roll-in shower, a raised toilet seat, a transfer lift — all the relics of disability, all idled like me.

Disability and its trappings don’t disappear just because you’re stuck in one place, but that’s my point. Neither does the rest of the world. The yellow dog — with his goofy grin and his stuffed-bear tongue — teaches me that life is just as intense and juicy and thick with gratification as it ever was. Until the fat lady sings, life keeps happening. All of it. Not everyone believes me, but it’s perfectly clear to me and the dog.

My family and friends have long since moved past society’s standard assumptions about my quality of life. Haven’t we all lived it together? Yet I think they’re saddened by my exile-at-home. They drop by to fill in the gaps they perceive. That’s enriching for me, but there are no gaps. Life doesn’t go away. Where could it go?

Between my two worlds — which are, of course, only one world — is my work. Squawk of conjoining modem meets squeal of coupling hummingbird. Deadlines approach, thunderstorms recede. Data flows, grass grows. The connective tissue of my life.

I think of how many of us are stuck in one place, with known limitations and unknown prospects. Then I remember how frequently nondisabled people feel beached and restrained and uncertain. My yellow dog says that’s the essence of being human. He says that’s our highest goal, to be fully and truly what we are. Like him, actually. Life isn’t all about fire hydrants, he says, but about being in the right place, in this place. It’s about what we can see from here.

Easy for him to say, as he comes and goes with his goofy grin. But yellow dogs surely know.

Criplessness

By Tim Gilmer
September 2015

Many of us like to say things like, my disability does not define me, and I don’t think of myself as disabled, but really, just how far can we go with that mindset? I remember it was a big deal when I turned 40 and realized that since I was paralyzed at 20, my life could be divided neatly in half — 50 percent able-bodied, 50 percent disabled. Now that I am 70, I have to lay hands on a calculator to figure the percentage. Let’s see, 50 divided by 70 = 72.429 percent of my life I have lived with a disability.

Mathematically, for those of us with acquired disabilities, the percentage grows each day but will never quite reach 100 percent, even if we live to be 3,482 years old. In my case, on my 3,482nd birthday, I will have lived 99.426 percent of my life with a disability. And what of those of us who were born with a disability? If you have been disabled for 100 percent of your life, how can you not think of yourself as disabled?

I will let you in on a little secret.  At the age of 70 I enrolled in an online class at a major university. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. The class is run like an intimate workshop. We started with eight in the class, and now we are down to seven. We meet once weekly for three hours by Skyping. We look at each other’s faces and listen to ourselves interact with the instructor and each other, and I would estimate that I am the oldest student by at least 30 years. I’m older than the instructor by about 20 years.

I’m also quite sure that I am the only paralyzed, below-the-knee amputee wheelchair user in this class. What makes it interesting, at least for me, is no one in the class knows that I am sitting in a wheelchair. They only see me from my chest up. I have the perfect setup to exercise the mindset of I don’t think of myself as disabled because as far as anyone knows, I am not.

Usually, in public or when meeting people in person for the first time, my disability is the most obvious thing about me. But now that I have a foolproof opportunity to reverse that perception, I have no need for it.  In fact, the opposite is true. I am dying to tell my classmates that I am paralyzed, crippled, with one leg missing below the knee, and that I have been wheeling around for 50 years. My crippled identity is just bursting at the seams to express itself! Calm down, Gimpster … calm down.

But since the class has nothing to do with disability, I can’t find a logical way to divulge my true identity, unless I decide to spontaneously blurt it all out and spin circles and do wheelies in a wanton display of — dare I say it? — disability pride.

Truth is, I feel damn good about my disability. Without it, I am not me.

By Ian Ruder
August 2019

Whenever anyone tells me how inspirational I am, I think back to Nike’s famous 1993 commercial featuring NBA legend Charles Barkley.

With the camera zoomed in on his right eye and nothing but the sound of the basketball bouncing in the background, Barkley told the audience, “I am not a role model. I am not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”

Over the years, and the many instances of people patting me on the shoulder or giving me the thumbs up as they told me how inspiring I was, I came up with my own play on Barkley’s words.

In my dream version of the commercial, the sound of my power chair cuts out as I tell the audience, “I am not your inspiration. I am not paid to be your inspiration. Just because I use a wheelchair doesn’t mean I should motivate you to live your life.”

I’ve never actually said this to anyone, but just thinking about saying it, and picturing the look on the face of the person I said it to always gives me a brief moment of satisfaction.

If you use any sort of mobility device or live with any kind of noticeable disability, chances are someone has told you how inspiring you are. Actually, chances are pretty good lots of someones have told you that. And chances are you know how frustrating it can be.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with being inspirational — people need inspiration, and there are countless stories of people doing amazing and heroic things that are ripe for the picking — but when that inspiration is grounded in ignorance, its benefits are suboptimal.

Until our society can get past the notion that life in a wheelchair is a burden and that all of us “wheelchair-bound” people are doing yeoman’s work just by existing, we will be exploited for the inspiration of others.

You may ask, is inspiring someone else really harmful?

I’d say yes. When the bar is set so low — simply existing with a disability — it reinforces uneducated stereotypes and misperceptions about living with a disability. As Emily Ladau points out in her excellent essay on inspiration porn, the mischaracterization and labeling can lead to identity crises for people with disabilities.

When others see your day-to-day existence as a Herculean achievement, how are you supposed to feel when you accomplish a long sought-after goal you really had to fight for?

For a long time, when people told me I was inspirational, I’d look in the mirror. Where they saw inspiration, I just saw a guy trying to get through the day and live my life.

Today, I’m more likely to smile and start a discussion to see exactly what they find so inspiring. If the results are predictably disappointing, I take solace in knowing I’ve got the perfect thing to say. “I am not your inspiration …”