Overcoming Disability and Finding Personal Freedom: A Meditation

I do not often talk about my medical condition, because my life has been defined by the struggle to not be defined by that condition. In a perverse way, this means that the condition still defines me.

Until now.

Now I wear it on my sleeve, and do not keep it stowed away in the shadows. I have muscular dystropy, I use a wheelchair, and I’m a human deserving of respect on its own terms.

Change is the only constant in life. Humanity grasps for the unchanging under the shadow of this fact, because it uniquely knows the fate that haunts it. We are all subject to this decay with time, and those who only feel sympathy for the disabled, or for people like me who progressively weaken, should remember that they are subject to the exact same decay on a timeline that is not that much longer. We are all in this together.

The “weak” are not an object of sympathy. They are human in its most raw expression, a juxtaposition of nature’s cruelty and the human drive to transcend it.

That insight allowed be to dispense with the struggle to keep walking, to live under the constant threat of potentially life-threatening falls. But letting go was the ultimate liberation. The wheelchair is now a symbol of freedom, not of captivity. It is my means of…