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INTEGRITY DISABLED By Kurt W. Franke
Surely, integrity is the foundation of social interaction for every individual on this planet. Without personal integrity, business, trust, love, and most everything that espouses everyday life cannot exist. Having integrity bestows personal power. Societies entrustment to a personality of integrity affords unimagined opportunities to accomplish whatever he or she decides to attempt. Without integrity, life will abandon this person. They are left forever searching for reasons for their failures through life. Integrity is the ballast for acquiring personal respect and the premise for love of oneself. The able-bodied population takes for granted their personal integrity. When one is socially attractive with all of one’s body in proper working order, everyday life is filled with respectful dignities apportioned to that person without them ever asking or searching for this valuable merit. The able-bodied world naturally grants this person respect and assumes they are trustworthy, capable of loving and are skillful at what they profess to do. This is the gracious result of being physically appealing and able. That is what life yields to those who are lucky enough to have lived life unscathed. When physical disability steals the innate freedoms from one’s life, there is a certain loss of self-confidence, which in turn, stomps out whatever personal integrity this unfortunate person’s spirit had constructed. Suddenly grave self-doubts undermine this person’s psyche. They begin doubting fundamental details about themselves of which they never had given a thought. Everyday situations with people, business and their personal lives are obscured with mottled trifles about how and when certain regular tasks must be done. When a physically injured person observes himself or herself in the mirror, they see a different person than who they wished to be. A personal dream they have always lived with has now truly departed. They espy a hurt person, both physically and emotionally, who is no longer the person they once knew. Self-respect comes into question: they see what seems to be a weaker person. Everything they had lived for suddenly seems to have vanished. Their body and spirit are no longer the same and they are left deeply disquieted with a sense of desperate aloneness. Nothing can be changed. Consequently, the result is hopelessness and colossal inner conflicts coupled with bottomless doubt as to where their heart and spirit bear in this world. Encompassing fears swell from within their heart so that whomever meets them through the days of their coming life will forefeel this condition through just a glimpse into their disabled-person’s eyes. Forever this person will attempt to hide these feelings until the one-day when they’ve gained the understanding, insight and character created from years of unrelenting personal suffering, to alone accept his or her unpleasant plight. A disabled individual never wants sympathies from strangers and definitely not from those whom they love. It would be better having the able-bodied world simply understand the ordeal of the disabled in attempting to maintain a demeanor of personal dignity. For a person who lives with pressing inner doubts, the unending intimate difficulties confronted day by day are devastating. The drain on the spirit is positively destructive and leaves a disabled individual with very few choices in combating and then accommodating this constant stress. The single way for life to be made easier in attending to this monstrous problem is for the able-bodied population to somehow understand the depth of these feelings which are so constant in a physically disabled person’s life. Regular society must understand their own natural instincts to seek vulnerabilities in the disabled and certainly not to fall prey to this odd facet of our humanity. They mustn’t focus this ugliness on those who are physically different than they. If this could be accomplished, life for all would be improved. This, of course is bordering on being unrealistic. The world is a strange place full of unfairness and perpetual undercurrents of insidiously vicious motivations brought upon by the pathetic part of our human condition. As a person with a severe disability, I know how difficult it is confronting what others, in such compromising manner, are thinking about me. It touches the deepest part of my inner feelings about how I view myself. The results of undermined basic confidences concerning one’s life are impossible to hide from you and from those you know and love. This is because to love someone you must have certain qualities within you to share your life with another living soul. In allowing yourself to get closer to someone, you must let him or her know how you feel about the world around you and eventually how you feel about him or her as an individual. If you are not living harmoniously within yourself there will be a problem sharing your life with another’s life. Attempting to hide these incongruities from someone you want to love is all but impossible. While living with physical disability we often find ourselves falsely inflating our personalities in a last ditch bid to escape the panic of the loss of personal integrity. Reaching this stage of such complicated, integrated self-deceit creates a bumpy road of desperation testing the strongest of personalities. After all of these painful attempts and the loss of precious time, then the disabled personality find themselves living the biggest personal lie of all: believing they are something they are not. This is done to plainly survive in society on a daily basis. Between common everyday tasks while living life’s labyrinthine roll, a disabled person may be unaware of the depth of their self-deception. Going on through the day while posturing in a certain manner and concurrently unaware of how they are acting procreates a constant feeling of discomfort that forever curiously torments from deep within. The gnawing anxiety produced will make everyday life almost unlivable. Somehow the heart knows your inner spirit is living a terrible lie and this lie is being told to those whom you care and love. This above all, is the most tragic condition of the loss of personal integrity brought upon by physical disability. When the disabled individual discovers this predicament they are engulfed in a sea of angry frustration, which leads to ruinous disappointment. The monumental lies lived in such appalling detail are suddenly realized. This person now horrifyingly understands how they have been acting and what they have been expressing to those to whom they are personally attached. Shocking limitless hurting frustration swarm over their personality after grasping the real reasons this has occurred: because they are physically disabled and always will be.
All Rights Reserved 2004 Kurt W. Franke |
