The Illusion of Able-Bodiedness

Right now, I really want to be able to pretend to be able-bodied again.

I have spent much of my life getting good at pretending.  It meant that my incapacities were moral failings rather than concerns of health, sure, but somehow it's easier to be a failure than to wrestle with actual embodiment, and living in a body that in subtle, quiet ways fails to serve what I want to do with it.

(But in the spiritual process that comes of needing to sharply start shedding those comfortable lies, the comfort goes along with the lies....)

What brings this to a head, of course, is the way treatment brings health into a sharp relief.  If I can take a pill and be more energetic, more functional, stronger, more competent... then all the structural incompetence is something that can't stand, and I have to replace it with something else.

If I manage to put trust in numbers when I could not put trust in myself, and the numbers not only reveal my autoimmune problem but other deficiencies in my chemistry, then I cannot ... not honestly ... say that one set of numbers validates me and the other does not.

Even if it would be nice, when the treatment for the other set of numbers makes me frail and helpless and trembling and unable to stabilise my emotional state, to say "I don't believe in this" and throw it aside.  Because I looked up the problem, and it had things like risks of permanent neurological damage, and even if I don't believe in the dualism and even if I don't know how to comfortably be in my body my mind, I was using that thing, okay?

Being angry is getting me through it.  It gives me enough strength to keep from collapse.  Maybe not the best of solutions but for the lack of anything else that works I will just keep at that.  I can be angry at the loss of my illusions, here, even if many of them were illusions that I was worthless, that I was just as free to act and be and do what I dreamed in the world as anyone else.

I spent time working on, wrestling with, fighting my way to a place where I could work on embodiment, on not drifting up into the realms of the theoretical and the mind.  This is a thing that's part of my training in my Craft work, something that I need to do to be effective in reality, and as I get deep into this work, deep deep in, my body's frailty catches me and I am caught in this deep, penetrating weakness.  And because I can't just stop what I'm doing, pop up into the realm of the mind, for so many reasons, I have to face my way through what it is to be embodied in a body that ... is like this one.