Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. With our big brains, opposable thumbs and instinct for language we have been able to explore, conquer and populate every corner of the Earth; from the driest desert and highest mountain to the Amazon basin and the cold of Siberia; we even have people living in space!
There is a problem. An epidemic, a sickness fragmenting our societies very fiber and woefully little is being done to eradicate it. This debilitating problem, plague to sanity, endangers over a third of the world’s population; the end is not nigh. I’m of course talking about the disease of the designers.
Those words, like a festering wound, would echo through my being and cause a mental pang that left me enraged and unsettled.
I guess some would say that I was oversensitive – I mean they were just words. Silly, stupid words that I should have been able to let roll off my back. At least this is the coping advice I was given my whole life (drastically easier said than done, mind you). The memories however, the ones that crawled into my mind when I heard such words, were unavoidable and couldn’t be easily forgotten. What are you really supposed to do when words such as these, are used to define your differences?
All of my disabilities, foibles and peculiarities feed into the process.
My years of jerking cars from wrecks and hauling them across San Jose produced the mundane side of Hooker.
My being overweight, love for cooking and caring for others shows up in Dolly the dispatcher.
My year spent in a wheelchair during college shows up in the retired detective.
The biggest single event concerning both TBI and PTSD would have to be my being hit by a truck while standing on the side of the road. This was a huge shock to me, as up until that time, I was proof-positive that I was almost bullet proof, or at least invincible. Double digits of surgeries later, I can tell you that I wasn’t. Well, not quite.
One of the few things I can remember was clawing my way back up to look over the guardrail to the tiny ants below on their own road.