This past week has been one of the most physically challenging of my life. Quick backstory: about a week ago I cut the edge of my middle finger on my right hand with a router while working on a personal woodworking project. This is a router, for those of you that don't know, here is essentially how I was using it, and as far as the injury goes, I won't include a picture but I essentially tore away every layer of skin on my finger and narrowly avoiding hitting the bone. Long story short, it wasn't pretty and my hand has been in a splint for the past week to help it heal, giving me effectively one functional hand to live with.
It's been difficult, to say the least, adjusting to one-handed living, with some of the easiest parts of my day (taking a shower for example) quickly becoming some of the most challenging and dreadful. I vow to never take my two functioning hands for granted ever again once I can get this splint off completely, but I've definitely gained a lot of insight and appreciation for the challenges a lot of other handicapped people deal with daily. I'm lucky in the sense that eventually my finger will heal and I'll be able to live normally again, but unfortunately some people don't have that same luxury. In fact, tens of millions of people live with a physical functioning disability that affects their daily life, and that's only statistics gathered for the United States. I think it's safe to say more of our world is handicapped than we realize, but have we constructed a world where people can live with relatively the same amount of ease regardless of physical ability?
The past few days have taught me that the answer to the question is a resounding no. We may fool ourselves into thinking that anyone with a disability has the means to live normally, but while there may be an element of truth in that notion, as a general rule, the world doesn't take too kindly to handicaps. There used to be a show that ran on TLC called Little People, Big World that profiled a family of six, three of which have dwarfism, a medical condition characterized by abnormally low or slow growth. The point of the show was to highlight how people four feet tall could adapt to a world that's been built by and for much taller people and live a relatively normal life; while this was accomplished to some extent, what I remember about the show is how much of a struggle they seemed to go through to convince the rest of the world that they weren't struggling. If that doesn't make any sense, essentially the problem I've observed is that although it's possible to appear normal and modify the life of a handicapped person so that it doesn't stand out as different from anyone else, the amount of work that goes into appearing normal or trying to live normally is a testament to how not normal such a life is.
Why does it all matter though? Like I said, eventually I should (hopefully...) heal up just fine and not have to try to make my life normal, because it will be naturally. The takeaway should be that if we care at all about empathy and really allowing everyone to live with equal ease, we need to be much more observant and honest with how people with disabilities live. Opening a bag of chips or using a pair of scissors have been harder this past week than ever before in my life, but for some people that level of difficulty is the norm. Are fully capable people responsible for constructing equality amongst the disabled and the rest of the world? I'm going to stray slightly from the Devil's Advocate nature of this blog and let personal experience takeover; yes they absolutely are responsible, and if we're going to keep telling ourselves that we live in a land of opportunity and equality, we need to regularly check with the entire population and take the necessary measures to make sure that's true.
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