Gimp, disabled, crip, physically challenged. I’ve been all of those and more during my lifetime of being, uh, less than normal.
Well, almost my lifetime. I was OK for the first two months, then a virus led to a blood clot, which led to weak, atrophied feet and legs, and a journey through health care hell.
One of my first labels was “crippled.” It said so on the sign of the hospital where doctors repeatedly cut and plastered, trying to fix me. “Hospital for Crippled Children” was one of the first phrases I learned to read. I was crippled.
I started second grade at a school designated for “orthopedically handicapped” kids. Our area was adjacent to a real school, but oh so separate. The segregation was obvious, even to a 6-year-old. Our two classrooms were removed from the rest of the complex, and we usually ate lunch in the same room where we studied the three Rs. On the rare occasions we went to the cafeteria, we sat at a separate table from the other kids. I was handicapped.
Then mainstreaming laws came down, and separation wasn’t OK anymore. Fifth grade was my entry into the real world. I went to real school, made friends, learned to play four-square, and it didn’t seem to matter much that I was different. I tried to be just Marcia, not a condition.
And so it went through five more schools in three states. I balanced academics with medical appointments, did school work on my own during hospital stays, and tried to make friends in both worlds.
At 14, I had my left leg amputated. The limb was irreparably battered from years of botched surgeries, and amputation seemed to be a way to end the cycle of injury-hospitalization-surgery.
This change was a bigger adjustment than all the other changes in my life thus far. I discovered there is a world of difference between having a gnarled, misshapen leg and no leg at all. Every activity was more difficult, and passing for normal was no longer possible. In my mind, my level of “handicapped-ness” took a giant leap upward.
I looked forward to college, hoping to lose my different-ness in the world of a large university. With the help of University of Colorado’s office for disabled students (there was that label again), I managed, focusing more on finals and papers than on doctors and orthotics. I dated, I studied, I hung out – just like everyone else.
It wasn’t until my first job that I was labeled “a person with a disability.” In fact, that job was at The Center for People with Disabilities, in Boulder. That particular label was a mouthful, but I went along, learning that while people with disabilities have a sense of humor about their condition, those who serve them do not. However, I fit in with the culture of that organization, in a way I never had before. It was discombobulating, for someone used to being the square peg in the round world of the normal. I had to move on.
More jobs, more school, new places to live, new challenges. As my life has progressed and I have, I hope, evolved, I’ve had to find new ways to describe myself. To think of myself. At different times, I’ve used different labels, labels that changed not when I’ve changed, but according to custom and fashion, usually dictated by the able-bodied.
What I’ve learned is that how I view myself – how we all view ourselves – should not be dictated by others, and that labels are as limiting as wheelchairs. Words can cut deeper than a surgeon’s scalpel. It’s what we do, not how we move, that makes us valid.
Labels, schmabels. I’m Marcia.
Marcia Darnell (ink@amigo.net) lives, writes and challenges stereotypes in Alamosa.
