Interior Palsies

"There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. --Virginia Woolf

It is not so much the embarrassment. I have dealt with that, taken myself apart and reassembled the pieces, frightening off midwestern humorists and dozens of other collagen enthusiasts, no. This is not the wedge; loathing is. Disability center dynamics literally make me sick to my stomach. The endless presentations, sex seminars, legal aid professors lecturing about benefits and assuring downtrodden alumni that services offered by law students are limited in scope, without reference to the mystery of how state budgets get codified in Harrisburg, people like Linda constantly neutering the semantics of the English language: "Attendants are not care givers but assistants." That is Linda's voice. "We categorize it as excess revenue." She complained to me when we argued over our computers that no one wanted to see her for herself. I tried to see her, and discovered a raptor beneath a parakeet's warbling delicacy, which means befriending this former boss was a mistake. The trial for a sterile and segregated case management compliance model that made me promise after promise after promise and never followed through, hurt me physically as well as triggering a crisis is slated to rule for the plaintiff, and yet I am a quadriplegic, who though mainly self-sufficient when stable, can nose dive just as quickly. 

A disabled in action member Susan exclaiming "you have balls," this during the rare strategy gatherings I attended. Yes. Balls to defy Erik and shutting the she-man down when he attacked her.
Balls to confront Linda and take them all on and come away from all that significantly beaten.
Balls to make online users leery. Balls to be totally familiar with the interior cripple who will behave like one when it suits, to don that voice, the little girl inside who in all other things being equal wants to stamp her foot and get a new able-bodied warder like Jayne Anne. Ambulatory women protected me from my mother when I was young. Psychologists in repressed marriages made me dinner; physical therapy aides taught me catechism. Camp counselors taught me the intrigue of boys, so why can't I have more successful writer friends? Like Joanie chasing me. Mentally retarded girl practically falling out of her lap to have me ward her.

As I have shown, however, I have as well the ruthless analysis of my own interior calculus, one that knows I have passed the female novelist scene, not quite so rewarded anymore by literary press culture, so perhaps I am play acting, indulging the regression, the assurance of an ambulatory baby sitter. I have taken charge of Joanie in the past. Taken her out. She's harmless, a child who thinks she fazes me with an admission that she dated my fourth cousin. He is also afflicted (that corrupted Old World genetic code), barely walks. I hardly know him. There isn't much more quality of life time for the sacrifices and choices I need to make, and that forms part of my morose shadings which bloggers are not supposed to indulge. I am weakening; in not so many years, I shall soon be mainly bed ridden. Ms. Dezenski will probably retire with accolades, unless I really have the stones. She withstood the Crothers treatment paradigm for seven years, a daughter of presumable Jewish affluence.