Original work from our Writers, Guest Bloggers and Freelancers
My teacher signed to my class, throughout the year, how accepting the deaf were of people outside of the deaf community and reminded us if the deaf participants signed too fast, at the events, to tell them to slow down and to inform them that we were beginning signers.
Learning that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with me took years. And along with that, I learned many other things, vital life lessons that I should have been taught as a child. I learned how to say I wasn’t okay. I learned how to fight back. I learned how to be angry. I learned how to be me, an agender asexual bisexual person with Bipolar II and an eating disorder. I learned how to scream. I learned how to love.
I just wasn't getting it, I thought. Then I met Tina and she reframed my train of thought. “Depression is like a disease,” she sympathized as tears rolled down my cheek one at a time as if they wanted to be fair and give each other recognition; my family didn’t acknowledge this statement. Depression was something that was trumped and not coddled.
How did I get HPV? I have no idea. Web MD tells me that nearly every sexually active person will get HPV in their lifetime. That is comforting to know, but as a 20 something young woman who is otherwise healthy and has never really "gotten around" it is also infuriating.
Imagine feeling that while lying in bed, immobile, seeing nothing with your eyes wide open. You are not sad, you are simply defective, like a toy whose power switch is turned on but someone cut the wire to its outer circuits...These time periods make me feel like the atmosphere has thickened into a hyper-stimulating suffocating fume of numbing panic because I can’t put my finger on exactly what is wrong or what’s happening to me, but I can’t shake that my whole body feels dysfunctional. Every part of my day becomes affected. Every part of me shuts down in response.
Deep rooted unhappiness tends to dwell when left on its own. It is like a visitor that you never actually invited over. This visitor drops his/things off in the spare bedroom with no intention of leaving. Depression can rest within a person forever. Unwatched it will grow, slowly suffocating its life source with no avail. Hope for relief can seem like a distant wish that may never be granted.
The gathering is called a tea party, and there are a few different speakers who share their stories, and their struggles with cancer, or as cancer care-takers. Some local high school students sing a song, and they ask how many survivors are year-long survivors. Then they ask about five year survivors, then ten, and so forth. I’m sitting next to Jennifer knowing that she cannot raise her hand for any of these benchmarks; that she has her speech in hand and that she wore her new dress for the occasion.
Something that was not immediately apparent was that I, too, would inevitably develop the same bipolar symptoms my father had and they would eventually become exacerbated by a lack of steady emotional foundation. Around the age of sixteen it occurred to me that my behavior was not typical and other people do not experience the same intensity of roller coaster emotion that I do on a regular basis.
Ask any member of the artistic team behind “The Forgiving and The Forgetting”, a new musical about one family’s struggle to embrace and accept Alzheimer’s disease, why they chose to get involved, and they will point not to a reason, but a person.
In the case of all different abilities, new strategies should be learned so that each person can complete the affected task successfully, but it must be remembered that though this person may find more difficulty in doing so, she is just as capable of that task, and possesses extraordinary capability in her own way of approaching and solving problems. And though her ‘disability’ may be identified so that she can teach herself new strategies to overcome its obstacles, it is not the key aspect of her identity. It may become part of what makes her her, but it is one of the many aspects that makes her a unique, composite individual.
