The 37th Disability Blog Carnival...
...is up at Ms. Crip Chick's blog.
My favorite so far (too busy grading papers to read most of it, but have read a few and will read more on breaks) is this, from the inimitable, wonderful Wheelchair Dancer, on the pleasures of the disabled body:
I am a new person with a new body. And I am having fun with it. There are days when I cry from dull pain; when it hurts to move with sharp pain. There are days when the pain seems unending. There are days when I don't move from the couch. There are moments, but quite honestly, not whole days when I recognize that my life would be MUCH easier if I could go back to my previous life, but I don't actively wish to go back to the sense of penned-inness that came with my previous body in its previous like. I LIKE my current body and my chair. And I am happy in the freedoms disability has revealed to me.
I still have fun, fantastic sex (yes, difficult family member, believe it. Thank you for asking and intruding into my life). Yes, it's different, but I am able to bring to it a kind of physical wholeness that I never achieved before. I even appreciate the sheets more: soft sheets interact with interact with the parts of my body where I have paresthesias in peculiar ways.
I am proud to be a dancer. I love the way I move my chair and move in my chair. I love what dance does for me, for my fellow dancers, and for the audience. Movement is phenomenal. And it's not just about the endorphins, either. We are making, doing, being art. I enjoy that. Do I miss running 20 miles a week? I ran because I feared getting fat; I ran because I feared my body. Do I miss that? No way. Do I miss the feeling of being in my stride and running flat out? No. Because I do that with my chair. My favourite movement right now involves stroking that comes from chair into my body (as opposed to simply pushing down on the wheels). Ha.
I still have the life of my mind, but it is also, now, closely connected to the life of my body. This somehow feels healthier.
These, some of the pleasures of MY disabled body, are doubled by an awareness that the rest of the world cannot imagine that they exist. I know what I imagine TABS cannot know. And this (perhaps real, perhaps accurate, but perhaps not) perception creates a kind of inner smile. A double layer of consciousness; I'm having fun, experiencing a kind of pleasure, and you will never know it.
I have never had a nondisabled body. But I will say: This, yes. I listen to people talk all the time about how topping is a chore and not a pleasure, or how topspace comes and goes. And well, yes, I'm enough of an old hand that topspace comes and goes for me too, and it makes me kind of sad.
But the pleasure I do get out of it all is a kind of freedom in my body that I don't usually hear when I listen to other tops who don't have disabilities. I don't hear that same sense that I get that my body is suddenly an endless flowing dance of possibilities and power. I tend to hear instead that the body's gotten boring and D/s is where it's at.
And I'm feeling some of that myself -- some desire for more of the mind and less of the body. So I get it. But at the same time, the sense of body-sacredness isn't gone, and I wonder if others don't feel it as much, or don't know how to fully access it or maybe just don't know how to talk about it, what it means to have physical power that is all yours, when others seem to think physical power and you are impossibly incompatible.
(On that note, I've had people ask me if I could aim my floggers. Yes, or I wouldn't offer to use them on you. I'm not that wildly unsafe, dear.)
My favorite so far (too busy grading papers to read most of it, but have read a few and will read more on breaks) is this, from the inimitable, wonderful Wheelchair Dancer, on the pleasures of the disabled body:
I am a new person with a new body. And I am having fun with it. There are days when I cry from dull pain; when it hurts to move with sharp pain. There are days when the pain seems unending. There are days when I don't move from the couch. There are moments, but quite honestly, not whole days when I recognize that my life would be MUCH easier if I could go back to my previous life, but I don't actively wish to go back to the sense of penned-inness that came with my previous body in its previous like. I LIKE my current body and my chair. And I am happy in the freedoms disability has revealed to me.
I still have fun, fantastic sex (yes, difficult family member, believe it. Thank you for asking and intruding into my life). Yes, it's different, but I am able to bring to it a kind of physical wholeness that I never achieved before. I even appreciate the sheets more: soft sheets interact with interact with the parts of my body where I have paresthesias in peculiar ways.
I am proud to be a dancer. I love the way I move my chair and move in my chair. I love what dance does for me, for my fellow dancers, and for the audience. Movement is phenomenal. And it's not just about the endorphins, either. We are making, doing, being art. I enjoy that. Do I miss running 20 miles a week? I ran because I feared getting fat; I ran because I feared my body. Do I miss that? No way. Do I miss the feeling of being in my stride and running flat out? No. Because I do that with my chair. My favourite movement right now involves stroking that comes from chair into my body (as opposed to simply pushing down on the wheels). Ha.
I still have the life of my mind, but it is also, now, closely connected to the life of my body. This somehow feels healthier.
These, some of the pleasures of MY disabled body, are doubled by an awareness that the rest of the world cannot imagine that they exist. I know what I imagine TABS cannot know. And this (perhaps real, perhaps accurate, but perhaps not) perception creates a kind of inner smile. A double layer of consciousness; I'm having fun, experiencing a kind of pleasure, and you will never know it.
I have never had a nondisabled body. But I will say: This, yes. I listen to people talk all the time about how topping is a chore and not a pleasure, or how topspace comes and goes. And well, yes, I'm enough of an old hand that topspace comes and goes for me too, and it makes me kind of sad.
But the pleasure I do get out of it all is a kind of freedom in my body that I don't usually hear when I listen to other tops who don't have disabilities. I don't hear that same sense that I get that my body is suddenly an endless flowing dance of possibilities and power. I tend to hear instead that the body's gotten boring and D/s is where it's at.
And I'm feeling some of that myself -- some desire for more of the mind and less of the body. So I get it. But at the same time, the sense of body-sacredness isn't gone, and I wonder if others don't feel it as much, or don't know how to fully access it or maybe just don't know how to talk about it, what it means to have physical power that is all yours, when others seem to think physical power and you are impossibly incompatible.
(On that note, I've had people ask me if I could aim my floggers. Yes, or I wouldn't offer to use them on you. I'm not that wildly unsafe, dear.)