truelove's ramblings

I haven't had to take a tramadol for my bad hip in a couple months now. My baseline pain levels dropped when I started taking H1+H2 antihistamines systematically (as well as some of my digestive crap resolving entirely unexpectedly).

I am constantly sore, my hip flexors are agonisingly tight (wanna watch me screech? poke my psoas attachments), but my bad hip has not screamed blue murder very often the past few months. At most it generally whisper-yells pastel robin's egg armed robbery.

I had to take a tramadol for my shoulder the other day, because I'd put T1/T2 out and had a hell of a time getting it put back, so it was fucking up the whole left shoulder girdle.

I had to take my muscle relaxant during aerial Saturday because my shoulder seized up in objection to one of the moves I was trying to do on silks. My shoulders are much better when I wear my underwire bras as much as possible; I haven't been because my brain is better when I don't have to fuck with changing my bra before/after aerial. I'm going to have to do that anyway, because my shoulders have been very slowly tensing back up to horrific and untenable baseline levels that will leave me with chronic headaches.

My right leg splits are back down on the floor and my heels are nearly back down on the floor in downward dog. I haven't forced the flexibility at all to get there, just sat with what the tendons were willing to do comfortably and let progress inch along. My middle splits will never be on the floor¹, which is fine. I know my body and pain better than I did 16-20 years ago, and I know how to stretch and not harm connective tissue. I still worry.

I can swim 600 yards in half an hour at an ambling pace. I cannot stand/walk for longer than 30 minutes without hurting, more than an hour without agony. I bruise like a particularly fragile, overripe peach. I take a minimum of 15 pills a day, and expect to do so the rest of my life. Miss a dose, and everything goes straight to hell.

I've been doing a lot of processing in the background lately on the fact that I am a part-time wheelchair user and I post the aerial videos that I, well, post elseweb and other apparent contradictions that I embody. A list of disparate facets of my health makes me sound fractured but mostly in my own self: I feel like one person, one body, a whole being. It's society that frightens me. Horrifyingly ablist society that likes to accuse anyone but complete paraplegics using wheelchairs of faking.

Faking... what? And to what end? I'm faking the fact that my life is better when I use a wheelchair for some things, to access all the benefits and perks that using a chair in public gives, like: the joy of people acting like asking them to comply with basic fucking courtesy is an unfair burden; people shoving my chair "helpfully" without consultation or so much as a by-your-leave; becoming somehow totally invisible to other people; being aware and concerned someone might attack me verbally or physically for what they perceive as "faking"? Wheelchairs don't just come with disabled parking tags, which is literally the only "perk" by anyone's standards that I can even think of -- not that that's actually a perk as opposed to a necessary accommodation for many to be able to go out and do things, ever. Many disabled people do not have those, though, even chair users: I owned my chair before I got my doctor to sign off on my hangtag, which is a temporary and we'll see if I ever get a permanent.

The society I live in would like the disabled, the old, the inconvenient to disappear altogether unless they have shittons of money and then maybe they can be treated like somewhat lesser shit. Society would definitely like people like me to disappear, who exist across categories they have conceived of as mutually exclusive binaries. (...true across so many things, actually².)

I can't fix society singlehandedly. But goddamn if I'm going to disappear. I can go around and exist, loudly, defying all expectations. Maybe, if I get their attention, I can get more people to understand that there is no linear equation when it comes to bodies, and that if someone is using an assistive device then that person needs it and everyone else should shut the fuck up and mind their own business. And that, yes, disabled bodies can be strong and athletic and not any less disabled; disability can be a fragment of a more complex whole than simple binary categories acknowledge.

I've made cracks before about the sexual hexadecimal as compared to the sexual binary. Maybe we can try on an understanding of bodies that encompasses that sense of complexity and individual nuance.

This is where my processing has gotten to: I am disabled (that is, I'm not able-bodied) in way that is similar to the fact that I am queer (that is, I am not a cis heterosexual). As it currently stands, there's a great deal of use for the umbrella term and I don't see eradicating the underlying need for it any time soon. (...or ever, actually. But I try to practice optimism even if I'm relatively bad at it.) That said -- I keep grasping for more nuance within the shelter of that umbrella, and I don't really know where to find it.

¹I only ever knew one person who had their middle splits completely down to the floor, in gymnastics; it was the 10-year old son of my coach. His younger sister didn't have it, either. I have no idea if he kept that flexibility, but the thing about this is that it's so unexpected: no one expects a male person to be the most flexible, but bodies are sometimes like that. Sometimes you break the bell curve.

²Huh, I wonder if, in addition to many other reasons why there is so much crossover, coming to accept defiance of one leads to easier acceptance of defiance of others is a contributing factor to the fact that so many self-identified disabled folks I know also self-identify as queer/trans/QUILTBAG. Because goddamn do I know a lot of queer disabled folks.