The Disability Olympics; August 18 2019

Quick! What do people with psychotic illnesses, chronic conditions, paralysis, or neurodivergence have in common?

They’re all debilitated in some way! That’s right! But which of those people is the most disabled?

I’ll give you a second to get to the right answer.

...

Have you got it? Okay, the correct response is:

It’s not a goddamn competition.

Being the most disabled person in the room has become a weird source of pride. It’s a bizarre way to validate your own suffering by invalidating others. If you aren’t suffering more than everyone else, you should be expected to put up and shut up, it seems.

I don’t understand where this mentality comes from. If you put two starving people in a room and neither one has legs, you’re not going to put a sandwich out of reaching distance and claim that whichever one of them reaches it first isn’t really an amputee.

That was a weird allegory. Let me try again.

If I’m mauled by a wolf, and you’re mauled by a bear, no one gets to tell me I wasn’t attacked just because the wolf is the smaller of the two animals.

... Hm, nope, still weird. Let’s just try it this way:

Your suffering doesn’t erase my suffering. And vice versa! We’ve all heard it at some point in our lives that ‘somebody out there has it worse than you’, right? That’s such a toxic way of thinking! Yes, absolutely, somebody out there is having a much worse day than I’m having. I have access to clean drinking water, I can communicate my feelings and pains, and I have a mother who loves me. That doesn’t get rid of the things that are wrong, like my hallucinations, my chronic and crippling pain, my migraines, my nearsightedness! And you might have all these problems but sans the loving mother, and that sucks! Let’s go get new glasses together and I’ll have my mom write up the adoption papers.

No one wins the Disability Olympics. (Not to be confused with the Olympics specifically for the disabled.) Suffering is not a badge of honour, and it sure as hell isn’t a competition.

Now it’s story time:

I wouldn’t have called them all friends. Not at first. Back home, I’d been something of a pariah; crazy Zaccheus, who claimed to hear deities. I’d been attuned to their mutterings since childhood. I knew I wasn’t like the local psychotics, the homeless beggars who babbled at nobody. The goddesses told me things I had no business knowing otherwise, and made eager overtures to prove their presence to me.

It’d mostly been Netteri, actually. She made calm animals with vicious temperaments or prompted flowers to bloom in places they had no business being. When I was six, Kiphes offered to display her power to me by killing my cat. I didn’t take her up on that.

But the birth of Seyhra changed all that. Kiphes and Netteri pulled a sister from the ether, an event we all saw in our dreams. A universal hallucination could be played off as coincidence, but some of us knew better.

Leander sought me out first. I’ll never forget the look on his face; there was hope, there was wonder, but most of all... He’d been ashamed. He’d never spoken a word to me before. He regretted that.