Being ill made me both stronger and softer
My whole life, I have been the type of person to avoid confrontation. I hated standing up for myself. I only argued within my family for the most part, and was the sort of person who could feel guilty and panicked just by making eye contact with a perfectly nice security guard having just paid for something.
So it is safe to say I did my utmost not to end up in confrontational situations. In fact, more than once, I headed off a potential confrontation by physically running away. Yes, that’s right, running away.
But after I became chronically ill and disabled, things started to change for me. Because backing down meant agreeing that I didn’t need to take up so much space. That I didn’t deserve the same respect as able-bodied members of society. That my illness made me lesser. I had to fight for appointments, for medications, for tests, for funding, for every possible type of aid. Because if I didn’t become my own advocate, then no one would. I was the one who had to draw battle lines, and to say “No more” to those who thought I could be trampled or intimidated into backing down. I had to look at the situation and realistically say “This isn’t going to get better on its own”, to say “I have to push back if I want to be heard”. Becoming ill made me harder, stronger, like forged steel. I have edges now. I stand up for myself. If I don’t agree, I will say so. If I am being shut down, I will let myself be angry. I will be prepared to argue my point, my view, my worth. I didn’t have those edges before.
Conversely, it has also made me softer, more empathetic. Suddenly I found myself in a place where people were discarded by a system meant to safeguard them. People who fell through the cracks in the fabric of an able-bodied, healthy society. People who felt invisible, left behind, silenced. People I probably never would have met. Never would have had the chance to learn from. I care, more deeply than I think I will ever be able to express, about every single person who feels they have lost their voice, for any reason, because I see and feel how it can be. I know now how it feels to be talked down to, to be belittled, to be made lesser for things beyond my control.
These past few years I have run the gamut of emotions, but most of all I have felt true empathy, and I have felt blinding, exhausting anger. The impotent rage of someone faced with something they know is fundamentally wrong at the core, yet cannot change. A promise of a life that is dangled like Tantalus’ grapes, only to be left just out of reach. A promise of care that can never appear, because the system wasn’t built to scale and not everyone can be helped. A promise to be treated like a person, only to be turned into an oddity at the last moment. I will not let anger be my legacy. I am pouring that rage into the molten core of my spine, to strengthen it, so that I can wield righteous anger and empathy both, and be both sharp, soft, and hard to break.
