A Disability is a Special Ability

It takes a lot of understanding for a person living with a disability, whether it is a mental disability or a physical disability, to overcome the difficulty and stigma of living with their condition. 

A disability restricts a person from leading a carefree life where one can go where they want, when they want.  And subsequently hinders one’s ability to orient oneself, to lead an emotionally fulfilling life.

The humdrum of leading a normal life gets to us all, the drudgery of working nine to five, whether you are a blue or white collar worker, can wear one’s patience thin, but most of us bare through the tough times.

To imagine you had a disability, consider your tough times, were too tough for you to get through.  You may lose your job or a loved one may fall ill, leading you to quit your nine to five job.  After the hardship of a normal life, you pick yourself up off the mat, and you get a new job or your relative’s health improves, or you may go through the pain of a loved one’s bereavement.

Without a disability life goes on, you overcome the hardship of distressing emotions, which make up any of one of life’s setbacks.  One goes through the pain but through enduring life with the support of family and friends, we pick ourselves up off the canvas and ‘keep fighting’.

There’s a certain continuum about life – like in contemporary society which has a spotlight on a celebrity in the public eye falling from grace through a sexual or criminal misdemeanour, they go through the burden of falling from grace but life goes on and they are back up on their pedestal to the respect and ‘adulation’ of the readers’ of contemporary media.

Taking a title from the ABC program Australian Story – my Australian Story is a battle with the mental illness Schizophrenia, a word I steer away from because medically, in psychiatry there is no definitive cure, the medication I was on is called Clopine, which as my former psychiatric nurse Andy says was the best drug for people living with my condition.  I have in my literary theatre play ‘Little Sister Big Brother’ now cured myself of the rarest form of schizophrenia – shared psychotic disorder with my now passed over father Kevin, I use the term pass over because his mother, my grandmother was Jewish.

My illness, alas was a family condition, as I shared this debilitating illness with my father Kevin, so I had a relationship to the disease in my childhood, adolescence and young adult years; before I suffered from my mental illness in my early thirties. 

As a child I remember my Dad coming home from work, sitting in the lounge room speaking about his fear that one of his bosses were going to drive down our street and find that he had come home early or had syphoned petrol from his company car into our mother’s car to save money as my father and my mother battled to pay off our family house mortgage.

Writing this article today and sharing some of my ‘family secrets’, the feelings of the despair about the past and the nervousness of the plans I have for the future as a writer and artist, make me feel sullen for firstly my deceased parents, then warmness to my relationship to my family.

The power of expression, whether it is art, in writing or in music, is a skill that is recognised in today’s mental health services, by mental health consumer bodies like Neami National.  If you are unfamiliar with this organisation this is a description of Neami National, taken from their website - Neami National is a community-based mental health service supporting people living with mental illness to improve their health, to live independently and pursue a life based on their own strengths, values and goals.

As I am now considered ‘recovered’ by my Neami National community health worker Sarah, I have exited the Neami service, despite me believing I have recovered to a point where I am socially functional and following my dreams in the arts.

I remember being disheartened when my sister returned home from her 40^th birthday celebrations and her telling me so many people were upset because they wanted to talk to me after so many years.  I recall the thoughts in my head and the feelings in my heart staying with me for days, me with schizophrenia unable to deal with my disappointment – caught in my own mental and emotional bubble to which I could not let anyone into.

A mental and emotional bubble for people with a medtal illness?  I believe this is the state of flux that all people with a mental illness live within – traversing emotions that sometimes and sometimes not get processed, according to the severity of their condition.

I recall last year’s local Doncaster Neami branch Christmas Party, in the tranquil surrounds of one of the parks in the municipality of Manningham, whose motto is half city half country.  While we all were enjoying ourselves ‘in half city half country’ with the good company playing games and celebrating the festive season, I looked at the Neami clientele and realised I no longer fitted in, as I could see for most of the people in attendance, they were in their personal life’s, still caught in the mental and emotional bubble, like the one I know so well.

I also recall the conversation I had with the Neami Branch Manager.  I said my mental health is so much better now that I had my first paid occupation in ten years, to which he refrained,

“We are all social creatures.”

I now consider we, social creatures hopefully on an unbroken mental and emotional lifestyle, not an emotionally divorced mental rollercoaster.  

Having let the light in on my understanding of mental illness, what is my understanding of the mental and emotional bubble for people living with a physical disability?  I’ll share an example of a birthday party I attended for a man with cerebral palsy who was confined to a wheel chair.

Another man in a wheel chair with the same condition was waiting to give his present to the birthday boy, so feeling I could help what I thought were his nerves in approaching the birthday boy, I introduced myself and said come on I’ll take you up to him, to which he explained, no he is feeding I must wait.  Through this interaction I knew instantaneously that this man knew his condition better than I did – he enlightened me to his condition and I thus felt emotionally caring.

This man knew his disability better than I, he had a certain specialness about his disability, a specialness that made me realise despite his physical difficulty, he was more emotionally aware of his condition than I realised, he had a special ability, that overcame in his character his physical disability.

In my opinion stigma still defines ‘a special ability as a disability’, like that stigma portrayed by young American songstress Miley Cyrus.  Forget the tweaking of Miley, Miley made derogatory public comments about one of her idols, the Irish artist Sinead O’Connor’s battle with depression, to which the Irish singer defended with hostility.

And like the racism retort of the young Collingwood supporter against the 2014 Australian of the Year Adam Goodes, where Adam said it was not the young Collingwood supporter’s fault.  The Miley-Sinead incident, highlights what is special about ‘a disability’ that I now call a ‘special ability’, a mental and emotional recognition and response to one’s life long personal condition and circumstance.