dis/ability

Yesterday Martina, who has CP, sat in her wheelchair and looked at me seriously and asked “Lisa, how could you be defective?” I just stammered. It was so hard to answer. I lived with that belief about myself for a long time. It was a belief that had been instilled from my history and my upbringing. It was a psychological disability that held me in its grip. I had mountains of evidence to the contrary, but I held that nugget of truth close to my heart lived my life trying to disprove it or hide it. I stammered. I did not have an adequate answer for Martina and could only reply: “It was a result of the abuse in my childhood. I raised in a situation where it was not safe to be in my body. Everything could be used against me. My body was fair game for torment. I was too fat, too tall, too clumsy, too blind, my feet were too big, my breasts were too small. There was no way to be enough.”

Earlier in the day Alito told me this story: He and Emery had traveled to a foreign city for a performance. A journalist came to interview them both. The journalist asked Alito first “if you could change something about your body, what would it be?” Alito, a dancer and gymnist of great talent, went on and on for 15 or 20 minutes with all the details of how he would change himself. Then the interviewer turned to Emery, who has CP, and asked “If you could change something about your body, what would it be?” Emery replied “Nothing.”

I come to the end of this month of Danceability training and I understand even more clearly that disability is a state of mind not a state of our bodies. We make choices about how we are in the world. It is very hard to break our patterns and our beliefs. For me, dance, yoga and movement have fundamentally changed my relationship with my body. I have come, in middle age, to believe in the ability of my body. And this is a blessing. I begin to understand the body as a blessing, no matter what the form of the body.