I haven’t written on this blog for a while. There have been a multitude of happenings for me to dedicate a post to: the time I went to Paris and had to get everywhere by bus due to a lack of other accessible transportation, the time I was asked if I’m ever angry at God for creating me with a disability, the time I went out for New Year’s Eve with my best friends as newly-turned 21 year-olds and someone took my friend by the shoulder and said, “Wow, it is so nice of you to take her out tonight.”
Normally, such incidents would warrant frenetic typing and a blog post in the making, but each time I sat down to write, I questioned if I should, because lately I’ve questioned this blog altogether.
This blog, “Delbasid,” has been an outlet for me to write about life experiences, musings, and reflections as a delbasid individual. I created it years ago after looking up synonyms for the word disabled, which included “incapacitated, weak, unable, and unfit,”–descriptors I could not and did not agree with. Thus, I decided to invent a new word to describe someone who possesses a physical or mental disease or condition, but is by no means “incapacitated, weak, unable, or unfit.”
Voila, delbasid–disabled spelled backwards–was born.
The purpose of this blog has been to use writing to prove this idea of “delbasid” as a concept–to declare, by sharing my experiences, that having Spinal Muscular Atrophy has nothing to do with my “capital A” Ability. That being “disabled” does not pervade the whole of my identity, but is just one of my many identities.
But recently, I have been thinking: does having a blog solely dedicated to my delbasidness accomplish the purpose explicated above? Shouldn’t my blog not exclusively be about my disability, in order to reflect the idea that I myself am not only about my disability? So all in all,
Doesn’t blogging about only the delbasid aspects of my life wind up being anti-delbasid in theory?
On one hand, I think I have become tired of writing about my disability. I have become tired of feeling a certain responsibility to write about my disability. And, most of all, I have become tired of thinking that my disability is the only topic I have to write about that is unique and interesting for others to read. For all of these reasons, as well as the questions cited above, I simply did not write for this blog for several months. (That and, well, life is busy.)
This quarter, however, I am in a class called Reading and Writing Poetry. While I did not previously consider myself a fan of poetry (read more about this here), I have been learning a lot in this class by being forced to write a poem a week. One of these learnings came merely from the fact that I found myself wanting to write poems about my delbasidness, but I stopped myself because of my pride. Psh, no, I’m going to prove that I have other things to write about, I thought, when in reality, all I wanted was to write a poem about the way I noticed that sometimes, shoes block the ramped entrance into my home.
So then I thought:
Isn’t refusing to write about my disability in fear of being “anti-delbasid in theory” actually “anti-delbasid in theory”?
I had similar questions for different situations.
For cover letters and job interviews: Am I talking about my disability too much? Not enough?
For conversations with friends: Have I talked about my caregivers too much? Or have I not opened up about them enough?
And then I thought: I am thinking way too hard about this.
I must learn to write about whatever I want to write about, without worrying about whether or not it is delbasid in theory or anti-delbasid in theory. And in the same way, I must learn to be okay with presenting myself as just myself, without worrying about whether I am coming across as too disabled or not disabled enough. In fact, in my personal writing and in person altogether, I should not be “presenting” myself at all, but just being.
So, will I continue this site in its current structure and form, dedicated solely to delbasid-related life events? Will I add non-delbasid related posts? Who knows, this blog is my oyster.
I will write to write, and be to be.
