Upside Of Anger

Now that I walk with a cane, every day, and I can no longer hide the disabilities as I once could, the question I get asked most often is: how do you deal with it? How do you deal with the pain? Well, obviously I use medicine, but for the years when I didn't my answer is simple: I just did it. I just dealt with it, buried it, covered it and kept going. It's the question my orthopedic surgeon asked me when I walked into his office back in 2000: how is it your walking?

As bad as my crushed hip was, I shouldn't have been walking, but I was walking. So, my answer to him was: I didn't know I couldn't walk. The will to deny and overcompensate for my childhood, now adult, disability had become subconscious; it was an automated program that just kept running. My will had found something to fuel it for which I had become completely unaware of. So, what was the fuel that kept me going?

It was, still is, to be honest, anger, pure and simple. I was full of anger, rage and, yes, hate for my conditions. I felt I was making a statement not just against my conditions but against whatever creator was up there that would stick a kid as well as an adult with such a shitty fate. Believe me I have heard a thousand stories of "disabled" people who turned to God to save them or that blaming God is a cop-out for accepting physical reality as it actually is. So, before I introduce another controversial stance towards life with a disability, let me just say it straight out: I hate God, nature, genetic fate, whatever the hell you want to call it, for giving me every shitty recessive gene in my family!

No child deserves to be born crippled, addicted to crack or mentally retarded...NO CHILD DESERVES SUCH A FATE! And nothing that any priest, minister, psychologist can say to ever rationalize such a bullshit fate can even remotely justify what it feels like to a kid, let alone the parent(s) who watch their own child suffer, who can't like other healthy kids enjoy life!

But before I get too carried away...understand that this is just a brief example of my anger...my fuel...my will to overcome my unjustified existence. For me, it was nothing less than declaring war on the creator I was taught about in Lutheran Church and the faulty genetic strain I was stuck with. And I believe that anyone who has ever suffered unjustly has just as much of a right to feel whatever "unacceptable" emotions are born from such a struggle. Whether a person's suffering is racially motivated, politically motivated, genetically motivated, the victims of suffering have a right to be angry!

Anger is power!