I Took a Walk Today (or The Eugenics is the Point)
CW // assisted suicide, self-harm
So I went out for a walk a little earlier, even posted a photo from that walk on Instagram like it was NBD. It’s therapeutic, right? My physical therapist has wanted me to increase my endurance by walking, right? Except that’s not why I went out for a walk.
As soon as I walked straight past the Dumpster fence instead of making the turn to do laps around the cul-de-sac, I went out to the road maintained by the town and THEN took a right.
I knew that “lap” was too long for me.
Almost a year in physical therapy, and I can’t walk around the block, not even the shorter block. Those trees, those leafless shrubs I photographed — they aren’t on the shorter block.
I’d waited for my husband and kid to run to the store so I could take too long of a walk because I couldn’t get the news story about the woman who “chose” assisted suicide because she couldn’t get housing assistance out of my head. I could have been her.
I could still be her, in some unknown future where my husband and kid aren’t around to help me. I cried the entire time I was walking. Thinking about how little people care about disabled people like us. How expendable we are.
How even this woman’s story in the news will only be a blip on some people’s radar, an “aww, that’s so sad” before they scroll to see what celebrity nonsense is going on or find a superspreader event to attend maskless.
I kept walking because, as much as it shames me to say, I wanted to collapse. I wanted my cane not to be enough. I wanted weakness to win. I wanted to find out I was too dehydrated for the warm weather. I wanted someone to find me on the side of the road and call for help for me.
I wanted to be hurt ENOUGH that people noticed and cared. I didn’t want to stop living or anything, I just wanted to be too much for my husband to take care of at home, so I’d stay overnight at the hospital for fluids & observation, so he didn’t have to take care of me just once.
I wanted for my loved ones to SEE ME and how I’m at my wit’s end, how little my body is capable of, informed via mass text that I’m not well. And to use that opportunity to tell them that this is what happens when no one else CHOOSES ME. Chooses ANY of us over “a normal life.”
But I couldn’t even do that right. I made it back home.
I crawled up the stairs on hands and knees. I removed every single scrap of clothing I’d been wearing, since they were all drenched with sweat. I collapsed in bed and pulled the sheet over me so my kid wouldn’t see me naked.
And then my poor husband, who I’d wanted to give a break to, to let someone else take care of me, spent the next hour or so trying to comfort me. Me, unable to speak. Still unable to speak now. Me, so ashamed I did this to myself, and made me even harder to take care of.
I wanted to be hurt enough that the insurance company would HAVE to give me more physical therapy sessions for because of the new injury I would have gotten by doing no more than my PT “homework” of walking for more than 5 minutes.
Self-harm isn’t always self-injury. Sometimes it’s just pushing yourself too hard, trying to reach the goals set for you that you thought you’d be able to do by now but still can’t. Not without consequences.
Disabled people like me harm ourselves this way all the time, though usually not intentionally. Pushing ourselves to do things that others refuse to accommodate for us. We are mocked for it. Told to stop whining, to stop expecting people to do ANYTHING for us.
We’re told that our health isn’t their responsibility. I want to be fucking done with this struggle. But if I stop struggling, I’d be just lying here waiting to die. And I want to live. I want all of us to live. Yes, even the bigots and other assorted assholes.
I hurt myself today
I focus on the pain
The old familiar sting
But I remember everything
