I find most stories centered around living with a disability, even when told by someone with a disability, tend to be these fluffy feel good attempts to make you feel alright about a lot of things that aren’t ok. For me, I find living with a disability to be a grueling and degrading experience for the most part. I have a lot of days where I feel like dying. I think its different for someone who is born with a disability than it is for someone who becomes disabled through injury. For me its hard not to see myself as damaged goods… Even in my moments of victory I can’t help but wallow in the thought of how much sweeter it would have been if I were on my feet.
I used the word wallow because I most often hear it used in relation to an amount of self pity.
I’m torn with whether happiness is a choice, because as much as on most days I think it is, there are those days and those times when its just impossible to be happy. Gratitude though… gratitude is about counting your blessings. Though it would change my world, my use of my legs might not change the world on a whole, let alone fix all the things I see wrong with it.
At the end of the day, I know I don’t want to die and I know I’d rather be a good person than a shitty one… I try to remember this at the beginning of my day, every day.