Written for a creative writing class a few years ago...

[I've been going back and forth over whether or not I should post this here. At the moment, I've decided that I should. And yes, I am rather fixated on writing about invisibility - there is a reason for that, you know.]

BECOMING INVISIBLE
2002

The difficulty is knowing where to start, what to tell, what not to tell. The difficulty is knowing whether or not to tell at all. The moral responsibility I feel that makes me want to lay it all in front of the world, the pressure to tell what cannot be told, what cannot be heard, what cannot be borne continually nudges at me. But I want to forget what I know, hide it, avoid it.

And so I vacillate, bouncing back and forward nervously on my courage, trying to convince myself that it’s safer, better this way, that I’ll save myself the terror of disbelief. But I am pricked by something inside me that instinctively wants to regurgitate what I know, consequences and cowardice be damned. But where to start. If I think too long I know I’ll never start. So I stop thinking and just jump in. And start with feeling.

The feeling of fingers on flesh. The harshness of the distant clinical touch, the reciprocal revulsion. But that’s no start. It’s too distant, you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? And so cowardice wins. This round at least. So try again.

The insistent hum of the fluorescent lights. The sharp shock to the retinas of the reflected glow off the white clinical walls, the terrified isolation. And that doesn’t work, either. The difficulty is obvious, I’m sure you’ve picked out the flaw already. And cowardice, or its better dressed sister, self preservation, wins this round too. We’ll try again, shall we?

A child stands in the middle of a room. She wears a white gown. She is surrounded by men - well, mostly men, who are also wearing white. They stare, and discuss, and scribble on pads of white paper. The child is staring too, but she is not talking, and can write nothing down. She is almost naked under the gown, wearing nothing but green cotton underpants with white spots. She stands with an unfamiliar rigidity, her body stiff, fear layered on a everyday tension. She tilts to one side slightly and there is less natural movement in that side. She stares, but she is not looking at the men, her gaze is fixed on a spot past their heads. And unlike the men in the room, her face does not hold a confident arrogance that can simultaneously take, assess, and discard its object without a second thought, it is a blind stare that turns in on itself and has no object but escape. The men talk amongst themselves, ask endless questions that are addressed to, and answered by each other, even though the child is the subject of the clinical inquisition.

Every now and then she is ordered to walk up and down the room and they throw around disconnected words and phrases like, ‘spastic movements’, ‘unnatural gait’, ‘inflexibility’. Or one of the white-coats leaves his seat to lift the child’s arms away from her body and hold them in midair for what seems like hours. Or another will ---

But no, this way doesn’t work either, it’s boring, easily ignored. We’ll go down another path. How about this?

You stand in the middle of the consulting room. The cold air from the air-conditioning lifts goose-bumps from your exposed flesh. It feels like you have been standing for hours, your left leg is starting to weaken, to wobble slightly, and it takes every bit of self control you have to keep standing up straight. The doctors stare at you, and talk about you using words you don’t understand. They call you ‘the patient’, and look through you coldly, scientifically. Although you don’t know exactly what they are saying, you know they are picking out all things about you that are wrong, that don’t work as they should. Every time one of them looks at you, they find another thing wrong.

You stand there, shivering, and you can feel yourself becoming nothing more than a collection of broken parts, legs and arms and a brain, damaged and defective. You stand there until you can’t even remember your name, or how old you are, or anything else about yourself, other than what is wrong with you. The room seems to get bigger and bigger, and the empty space around you is endless and unforgiving.

From a great distance the piercing eyes of the doctors continue staring at you, and look right through you. You can feel a series of glass shells surround you, one for every person in the room. They slide around you, one by one, slowly, smoothly, without making a sound. And at the point where the indifferent gaze of each of your observers becomes too much, you can hear a metallic twist and click, like the key in a lock, shutting you off from the world. Until at last, you are surrounded by a dozen of these glass shells. And inside the shells, deep inside yourself, you feel another empty space open up, black and cold. A space filled with the almost unbearable pain of forever being looked at, but never being seen, of always being observed, but never being known. But you will try and pretend for many years that the space does not exist, until the terror of it will cause you to spend a night trying vainly to fill the space with handfuls of little pea-green pills. But this will not work, and you will spend the rest of that night crouched over a bucket painfully vomiting into it the pills, and ---

And definitely not. I am undecided as to whether or not that works, but I have no doubt that it is possibly too painful, too manipulative of my audience, perhaps too unforgivably gratuitous. So I will try out my third and final option.

Mending the flaw in this whole drama, there needs to be an ‘I’, there is a ‘she’ and a ‘you’, but there is no ‘I’. You have been expecting it, I know. But that’s all I know. I don’t know how to put myself into this, I don’t want to put myself into this. I can’t. There is no ‘I’ here, there cannot be. I do not exist, I do not feel, I do not breathe. I am not here, I cannot breathe, I cannot feel, I cannot exist. I am invisible.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

[Monograph for university course 2001] The Invisible Body - Poem

[As part of the BA in Creative Writing that I started several years ago - and haven't yet finished - we had to write a monograph on a chosen subject, mine comprised several pieces of writing on disability. I'm posting each piece in a seperate post. Rereading this, I'm not entirely happy with a couple of lines, but I do like the premise of it overall.]

When you will not hear my pain
You cannot share my joy

When you will not acknowledge my hate
You cannot feel my love

When you will not allow my weakness
You cannot be supported by my strength

When you will not accept my difference
You cannot appreciate my beauty

When you will not see me
That does not mean I don’t exist

"Invisible Lives" - an older piece of writing

[Slightly edited from its original form to reduce occasional incoherence and increase readability - I had only just started getting things down on paper about disability at that time, and was still very new to the social model of disability and to the idea that what I was feeling about my life and my disability wasn't just peculiar to me, and that the difficulties I had faced all my life weren't my fault. So, baby-activism!]

INVISIBLE LIVES
Copyright 2000

Imagine having to justify your existence every day of your life. Imagine having to prove your intelligence to every one you encounter, even your own family. And imagine that intelligence being diminished, ignored and overridden by those whose only superiority to you is their ability to control the movement of their bodies. Imagine that complete strangers feel they have the right to stop you on the street and ask for the most personal details of your life. Imagine that people who have never met you or spent even five minutes in your company think that they have the right to determine whether or not your life is worth living. Imagine that, if you try and protest against this treatment, others have the right to declare you `hysterical' or `over-emotional', and ignore you, laugh at you, or worst of all; sedate you, pronounce you insane and lock you away. Imagine that at the same time as all this is unwanted attention is being forced on you because of your supposed `defects', who you really are is being rendered invisible.

When you have finished imagining this, and have thanked whatever higher power you believe in that this treatment is not YOUR lot in life, I ask you to consider the fact that this is what those of us who are disabled have to endure every single day of our lives.

We are made invisible by the same attitude that makes us public property. By the assumption that our physical and mental disabilities make us less than human, turn us into things for people to stare at and question with impunity, with no fear of reprisal. We are exposed to the prurient gaze of the well meaning public, stripped of all of the basic rights to privacy, our dignity and pride are ripped away, leaving us with only fear and shame, the most cannibalistic of emotions. When we are seen only for our differences, and the difficulties they cause; our humanity and realities are denied, we are not seen as people to love, respect and include, but as freaks, something to be fixed or shoved out of sight.

We are invisible people, for as long as we are only seen as stereotypes and objects of pity, and not seen for who we really are, we are not being seen. We live in a world that tells us constantly we are expendable, the most expendable of any marginalized group in the world. There is not one part of life where we are accepted - with the exception of the charity industry. We are invisible. And we are only allowed to be visible when we try to be `normal', and deny our disability.

Many of us are trapped in an unending exile, and the only help we are offered is insulting and facile. The assumption is that it is somehow the disabled person's fault, that we have to get out more, be more outgoing, be willing to make the first move/break the ice/make people feel more comfortable. Our isolation is blamed on the disability, and the supposed personality defects that go with it. No consideration is given to the view that perhaps any `personality defects' are not part of the disability itself, but the logical and tragic result of being treated as something less than human, that is not worthy of the same respect as someone without disabilities. Or to the idea that it may be that people who reject us, are doing so for no other reason than that we look and act a little different to them.

We are invisible because what is done to us, is hidden, out of sight, trapped under piles of words, excuses, reasons and rationalizations. We are invisible because what is done to us is not seen, and because what is done to us is not quantified and cannot be physically proven. Because it is so easy to say that something that is the result of mistreatment, is really a symptom of the disability.
We are invisible because all the best bits of who we are, and all the things that mean most about our lives, are not the things that are obvious, that can be seen at first glance, they cannot be laid out like a resume, and cannot be properly be put into words.

We are invisible because people refuse to see us, not because we do not exist. People are scared of us because they see in us what can happen to them. They try and make us disappear, so they do not have to be aware of our realities. We are the scapegoats, we carry their fear, we absorb it for them, so they don't have to think about it, so they do not have to feel, so they do not have to be crushed by it.

The invisibility that we suffer from is far more crippling than any disability, and more infectious than any disease. But there is a solution. It requires that you have the courage to acknowledge the fact that our disabilities should not separate us from the rest of society. You need to be able to acknowledge the fact that it is your weaknesses and inability to see us as human, that causes us the greatest pain, and not our disabilities. And it requires that you develop the insight to see as who we really are and and for what we can become.