I Marathoned To a Life of Disability
and others already have, or will too. Reflections on able-bodied life now gone, and the right to healthcare for the 99%.
I’ve been grieving for the kind of life I’ve seemingly marathoned into after running a billion laps made doubly weary with the weight of mental health conditions that remained unnoticed or unacknowledged until my mid-20s (despite the glaring symptoms) due to overall lack of information back in the days and the stigma. The kind of life I have now is primarily colored by frequent consultations and hospital visits, three times a month on average. This excerpt from a formative read on disability sat with me for months:
In 2022 alone, I got in touch with allergologists and psychiatrists for bipolar ii and severe social anxiety; and for the physical manifestations of those conditions: I had to see physical therapists and rehab doctors for chronic radiculopathy, and cardiologists for depression-induced heartaches.
I looked generously at photos of others showing their back-to-normal lives three years after the onset of the pandemic: going to activities for the able-bodied like wall climbing, camping, and clubbing. I often wished I were able-bodied too to enjoy things others are enjoying, but at the same time I think I am okay that I am not, for those same things are rich minefields of my triggers.
A major chunk of my healing began in 2020. There is a lot of shame in letting people know: that most of my healing began when the pandemic prompted everyone to stay at home. The pandemic is traumatizing for us all, in many plural and intersecting contexts that I cannot discuss thoroughly in this text, but I know wholeheartedly that we can hold space for these two things that *can* coexist together: that (1) the pandemic collectively fucked us, and (2) staying at home during its onset temporarily eased a separate longstanding pain I’ve been bearing. My major trigger is abundant in pre-pandemic scenarios: social interactions.
This separate pain constituted trauma from an ableist workplace, trauma from churches that put me in places of stigma, and trauma from school settings that couldn’t cater to my different needs—traumas I bore for being neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled.
Fortunately I did not grieve for unnecessarily too long and I am now just annoyed and smitten by the fact that not everyone can afford the headspace or finances to cover the costs of several treatments I’ve been availing; I have come to terms with the life I have now, and have finally arrived to a place called This Is Okay After All. I still have a lot of luck (at least for now) in this pro-ultrawealthy world, for I get ample support from my workplace: provision of healthcards and even allowance for my psychiatric meds.
States do not put a cap on the income of billionaires but puts a hard cap on the aid disabled people can get. I feel like I'm thrown crumbs for qualifying for only a measly 65-peso (maximum) discount for groceries per week. It's a garbage gesture given that I am on low-dose maintenance psychiatric meds that already cost 3500PHP a month. There are weeks where I feel like there is a need to up the dosage but I have been holding myself back from approaching my psychiatrist to request it, for increasing doses means heavy increase in costs.
We disabled people have been devilized in inhumane proportions and framed as lazy freeloaders that are burden to society when the real burden is the 1% and the bourgeois institutions that work for their benefit:
Most workplaces have disabling conditions due to the extractive nature imposed by the 1%, and this is even more unbearable for the already-disabled who just want to continue living, with a dignified life, if possible. The able-bodied grimace in making do and feel lucky enough to have been chosen over the disabled for employment, forgetting well that there isn't any safety net for them either at the end of the line:
There's a lot more people marathoning to lives of disability than I realized, and we all deserve healthcare to avail treatment for conditions that we are born with, that we gained by chance, and ultimately the ones that are slammed onto us by the ruling class.
We're rendered useless when pitted against the able-bodied or even with one another, cast to the side to slowly rot. To counter the widely accepted "Survival of the Fittest" justification, here is an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document:
It's a pressing time to outfashion leaving others behind for the sake of being preferred by the 1%, when we are all to be discarded once we begin to fail functioning as sources of their infinite incomes.
The destabilizing and core-shaking pains I've held or continue to hold from all this constitute a watershed of who I am today and every disabled self that I've ever been will wash through everything I ever will be. I find that I am okay with that, for I'd like to think that the thing I've become is an ally for the many disabled people of the world now, and the disabled-to-be people of the future.
I won't be be able to run actual laps anymore because of both my physical and mental disabilities. Others may only be able to lightly wrap their heads around the entire weight of this grief of mine, and it's alright; for I know we are collectively grieving for how much the gap between the rich and the poor has so cruelly widened to the harrowing detriment of the 99%.*
We have another kind of marathon to run, and it is the kind where the able-bodied and the disabled run together—waiting for one another, aiding one another, fighting for one another.
The future is disabled and the future is socialist. Tax the rich out of existence. There's no other way.
*two of my core sources on the widening gap between the rich and poor:
Rebel Cities by David Harvey: Fourteen billionaires have emerged in Mexico since the neoliberal turn in the late 1980s, and Mexico now boasts the richest man on earth, Carlos Slim, at the same time as the incomes of the poor in that country have either stagnated or diminished. As of the end of 2009 (after the worst of the crash was over), there were 115 billionaires in China, 101 in Russia, 55 in India, 52 in Germany, 32 in Britain, and 30 in Brazil, in addition to the 413 in the United States.12 The results of this increasing polarization in the distribution of wealth and power are indelibly etched into the spatial forms of our cities, which increasingly become cities of fortified fragments, of gated communities and privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance.”
The Border Crossed Us The Case of Opening the US-MX Border by Justin Akers Chacón: By 2020, the richest 10 percent of Latin Americans were estimated to hold approximately 70 percent of the total wealth of the region.
Over a hundred new billionaires emerged from the crisis (COVID-19) to be added to the ranks in the US, amounting to 724 (pandemic) United States, the top 1 percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing.