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Ese, write an essay...
Sep. 9th, 2024 10:56 am(from a joke from my stepdad when I wrote college applications and wrote many of them.)
Hope this one was more worth writing than all of that stuff... this is just a sample, though.
One thing I remembered from those first months is not feeling good enough for them, acutely conscious that I went to a state college with a big reputation as a “party school”—not that I, rushing home on paratransit, ever got to party much. But that same rush home also kept me from all the chatter about art, films and the big questions that people had told me I might love about college
. I also still debated hiding a few things: the severity of my disability, and, in a very related topic, how little I knew from my own experience about dating and sex. It was easier, back then, to hide my physical being, to take what I had learned in junior high and high school about being the dry little voice in the front row and apply it to the wilds of pixels.
Living as an idea was gratifying until we all started to become real friends. But maybe I might have dithered about the reveal longer if someone in Illinois hadn’t had a daughter with a diagnosis somewhat like mine. Also, people were wanting to meet me in my actual life which was certainly possible, but more logistically complicated than with my abled counterparts, on grounds that I couldn’t just hop in a car and meet someone, at the very least. Being more honest only felt like giving up some freedom for about a week, even though there was a part of me that had tried to conform that halfway expected, even though our guiding spirit was a televised cheerleader with a mystical calling, to have my thoughts and impressions valued less, or to become a curiosity for all the wrong reasons after people understood about the wheelchair and some of its discontents.
I guess having people at college say “But you’re so smart! “after revealing my mobility deficits and brain damage(different part of the brain) left a mark. I’d found a community that was intrigued by my differences.
Which is not to say that over the years, there’s never been a divide....
Hope this one was more worth writing than all of that stuff... this is just a sample, though.
One thing I remembered from those first months is not feeling good enough for them, acutely conscious that I went to a state college with a big reputation as a “party school”—not that I, rushing home on paratransit, ever got to party much. But that same rush home also kept me from all the chatter about art, films and the big questions that people had told me I might love about college
. I also still debated hiding a few things: the severity of my disability, and, in a very related topic, how little I knew from my own experience about dating and sex. It was easier, back then, to hide my physical being, to take what I had learned in junior high and high school about being the dry little voice in the front row and apply it to the wilds of pixels.
Living as an idea was gratifying until we all started to become real friends. But maybe I might have dithered about the reveal longer if someone in Illinois hadn’t had a daughter with a diagnosis somewhat like mine. Also, people were wanting to meet me in my actual life which was certainly possible, but more logistically complicated than with my abled counterparts, on grounds that I couldn’t just hop in a car and meet someone, at the very least. Being more honest only felt like giving up some freedom for about a week, even though there was a part of me that had tried to conform that halfway expected, even though our guiding spirit was a televised cheerleader with a mystical calling, to have my thoughts and impressions valued less, or to become a curiosity for all the wrong reasons after people understood about the wheelchair and some of its discontents.
I guess having people at college say “But you’re so smart! “after revealing my mobility deficits and brain damage(different part of the brain) left a mark. I’d found a community that was intrigued by my differences.
Which is not to say that over the years, there’s never been a divide....
