I’m Disabled.  How disabled I am is open for debate.  There are those who claim my disabilities are insignificant.  There are those who think I am nothing but my disabilities.  This is probably the case for every disabled person.  People want us to fit into their neat little boxes.  Unfortunately, we can’t do that for you.  If disabled persons have nothing else in common, one thing we all share is that we are more than our diagnoses. 

There can be no doubt that I have physical disabilities.  I need both hands to stand up.  I become more worried about being able to do that every week or so.  My diabetes has all but destroyed my body.  I have to nap, ideally, every six hours.  When I get lost in my writing or my recording for the podcast, I might go as long as 9 hours.  After that, there’s more than a good chance I’m going to pass out at the computer.  If I don’t watch my blood sugar carefully, any day can be my last. 

I’m emotionally disabled.  I have a diagnosis of depression.  I fight it in all the ways I can.  Perhaps, however, I need to learn to accept it, as a friend of mine on Facebook suggested.  This is our conversation on that topic.

As you know Fred, all things come and go.  Including your depression.  Depression often includes certain thoughts that can be very compelling.  These thoughts, however compelling, are even more transient than the feelings of depression.  We are drawn further and further into the vortex the harder we struggle with these feeling and thoughts.  Stopping the struggle, ceasing doing battle with the demons of depression seems like the exact wrong thing to do, but it is also the best way of caring for yourself.  You may have to stop the struggle a thousand times, or ten thousand, but like anything the more you practice the more skilled you become.  This is the way I learned to dance with my depression.  If I feed it with my life energy by struggling with it, it gets stronger and stronger.  If I stop the war, it eventually burns itself out, just like any feeling or thought.

Take the best of care my friend.

Fred Eder

Name Deleted that’s the most difficult part of depression, I think.  I expect myself to be happy, and when I’m not I treat it as a problem to be solved instead of an experience that is a part of who I am.  I feel guilt about being unhappy.  I feel weak.  I feel cowardly.

I need, it seems, to accept it in the same way I accept diabetes or having blue eyes.  It simply exists.  There may be things to learn from the darkness if I would allow myself to live there without feeling the need to escape.

Name Deleted

Fred Eder It is absolutely normal to want to escape experience that is unpleasant – anything from a finger prick when you are testing your blood sugar to the deepest darkest abyss of depression – to push away that which is unpleasant and grasp at and pull in what is pleasant. We begin to learn this probably even before we leave the womb.  It is the hook that leads us to a lifetime of struggle trying to have more and more pleasant experiences.  Each experience ends to be replaced by new experience in the ceaseless flow of experience that is life.  Whether grasping onto pleasant experiences to extend the feelings of pleasure, or struggling, fighting, battling to push away pain (physical or emotional), the effects are the same.  It is an unending struggle to obtain something that is, by the very nature of existence itself, not possible.  All experience is transient – radically transient.  We have no control over any of it.  Influence – yes.  Control, never.  Your expectations (learned thoughts and ideas) for “happiness”, “guilt”, “feelings of weakness and cowardliness” keep you tied to the very thing you want to kill.  Like Ahab bound to the gigantic object of his hatred that is dragging him down into the abyss – Melville’s metaphor is perfect.  If we are trying to get rid of something unpleasant, we have to grapple with it, fight with it. The question is, can we simply relax the fierce desperate grasp we have on the object of our desire (yes, getting rid of the pain of depression is THE desire), and LET GO of it – NOT get rid of it.  Can we stop hating it?  Stop wanting it to go away?  Can we, just as you say, accept it as it is and not trying to make it go away?  And in your case, not punish yourself for having the experience?  Can you accept that depression IS a part of what you are?  Something that comes and goes like the other vast expanse of moments that make up your life.  What if Ahab was able to release his hatred of the white whale?  How would his life and the lives of so many others (including the whale) have been different?  Maybe the white whale would have continued to come into his life at times, but without his hatred, it would have likely journeyed on.

Perhaps some of the things you might learn from the darkness is self-acceptance – how to live there without feeling the need to escape.  These are HUGE lessons in and of themselves.  The kind that liberate us.

I suspect that I am somewhere on the Autism Spectrum, but no doctor has ever confirmed this.  I have many, but not all, of the symptoms.  I undoubtedly think differently than most people do.  I almost certainly don’t process emotions the way you do.  Something will bother me, and I will say nothing about it because I don’t want to burden anyone else.  It will just sit inside me, getting worse and worse, until finally I am forced to confront the feeling in some way.  There is debate over whether Autism is even a disability.  Google tells me it is considered a disability from both a medical and legal standpoint, if you have a doctor’s diagnosis.  One of our producers, Scott Knight, said this on my Facebook page.

Autism in the past was less of a disability and more of a weird neighbor who did strange things and didn’t talk much, but what they did do they did perfectly.  Autism with several comorbidities can be disabling no matter what the structure of society is.  Disability is a condition that leaves you physically, intellectually, emotionally, or in any other way disadvantaged to the point where it makes it difficult to impossible to function within the parameters society expects from you.  Some accommodations allow disabled people to still participate in society, but they rarely create the same ease of access that non-disabled people experience.  Some disabled people cannot participate in society no matter how many accommodations are made.

Accommodations for autistic people rarely help me with any of the things I struggle with.  I am disabled by society because I am autistic.

I believe I may also have Rejection Sensitivity Disorder.  I learned about this only in the last few months, but I exhibit all the symptoms I’ve been able to find associated with this condition on Google.  These are the symptoms I have found most frequently.

• low self-esteem
• avoidance of social settings
• fear of failure
• high expectations for self
• frequent emotional outbursts after being hurt or rejected
• feelings of hopelessness
• approval-seeking behavior
• anger and aggression in uncomfortable situations
• anxiety

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria#symptoms:~:text=conditions%20which%20include%3A-,depression,anxiety,-Although%20symptoms%20of

I do my best to control the most negative aspects of this by avoiding any situation in which I may come in contact with another person who may feel hurt by my behavior.  I rarely, if ever, leave the home in which I live.  I get nervous when I take the trash out across the parking lot.  I went out to lunch with my best friend last month, and I needed several hours to recover from the fear I spent the whole-time masking.  I love her, and I almost never see her, so I was willing to pay this price.  I probably won’t do it again for quite some time. 

Here’s the thing about being disabled.  Many people believe it’s our own fault.  Part of this has to do with what is called “Just World Phenomenon.” 

In psychology, the just-world phenomenon is the tendency to believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve. Because people want to believe that the world is fair, they will look for ways to explain or rationalize away injustice, often blaming the person in a situation who is actually the victim.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-just-world-phenomenon-2795304

Instead of recognizing that poverty isn’t a lack of character, or that failure to comply with a police officer shouldn’t be a death sentence, or that disabled people somehow deserve what has happened to us, many people will convince themselves they are immune to oppression, persecution, or any debilitating condition simply because they do all the right things.  Bad things happen only because someone did something wrong. 

The total tonnage of advice I have received about how to “cure” my depression and my diabetes would be enough to stun a team of oxen in their tracks.  If I would only do what they tell me, my problems would be gone.  They want to make me all better so they don’t have to deal with the fact that it could happen to them, too. 

I would have no objection if someone cured Diabetes tomorrow afternoon, but I’m not sure I want to change the rest of who I am.  I don’t really want to be someone else.  I’m sorry if someone is uncomfortable with who I am.

I will be the first to admit to a list of flaws that go on nearly endlessly.  I just named a few of them.  I’m different from you.  I don’t, however, think that makes me worse than you.  I don’t know that I need to be cured of my Autism, and the efforts made to cure me of my depression have been ineffective.  Prozac has the effect of numbing all my emotions.  I fear becoming sufficiently depressed that I finally end my life, but I’m not afraid of being dead.  I’m afraid of hurting others who, for reasons passing understanding, love me.  They’ve done nothing to deserve the pain that my demise will bring.  The price of love is always pain.  I just don’t want to charge you any earlier than necessary.    

Seth MacFarlane, in The Orville makes this point: “People who try to take their own lives are unable to distinguish the future from the present.  There is no problem so immense that it can’t be solved in time.”  The Orville is obviously an offshoot of Star Trek.  I don’t think anyone makes any effort to hide that fact. 

Although one of my friends said, rather smugly, that she doesn’t worship at the Altar of Roddenberry, I have no trouble saying that I do.  Star Trek is an effort to show us that the kind of world of which I dream could be a reality.  And Star Trek does its best to address disabilities intelligently.  Sometimes it does it very well.  Occasionally it misses. 

In the episode, “Loud As a Whisper,” a person who is deaf and mute is brought to The Enterprise to negotiate a peace treaty between two warring factions.  The legendary diplomat, Riva, uses a chorus of psychics who can hear his thoughts to express himself.  When the members of his chorus are killed, it appears all is lost.  As a deaf mute, he has no means of communicating with the aliens.  It is only when he decides to teach both sides sign language that the peace can be made.   His “disability” allows him to solve the problem. 

In the same episode, Riva asks Geordi LaForge if he resents being blind.  Geordi, of course, was born blind, and he uses a piece of technology called a VISOR that allows him to see, albeit in a different way than most people.  Geordi tells Riva he doesn’t resent it at all.  It’s part of who he is, and he likes himself.  There’s nothing to resent. 

In the episode, “The Masterpiece Society,” it’s Geordi’s blindness that allows him to save a planet that is going to be destroyed by a fragment from a disintegrated neutron star that is going to move too close to their planet.  Captain Picard wants to evacuate the human colony there.  The society, however, has been genetically engineered and selectively bred to ensure optimum efficiency and happiness for everyone.  There are no disabilities on Moab IV.  If they leave their planet, their society will fall apart.  Geordi uses the same technology in his VISOR to devise a way to move the fragment and save the planet.  He finds it ironic that his disability allowed him to save a planet on which someone like him never could have been born in the first place. 

A disability doesn’t define who someone is.  It’s merely a part of us. 

We’ve all been brought up in a society that finds disability distasteful.  Sometimes we look at someone with pity when we see them in a wheelchair.  When we do, we are seeing only that one part of them.  We’re missing the rest.  Stephen Hawking did some remarkable things from a wheelchair using an adaptive device to allow him to communicate.  While I don’t envy him his disabilities, I absolutely admire his extraordinary contributions to the world.  The same can be said of Helen Keller.  

It’s easy to miss the fact that I’m disabled.  For a depressed, Autistic, diabetic who suffers from RSD, I seem exceptionally capable.  I write, record, score, and Horace a podcast every week.  I communicate with people on Facebook, and from time to time, on the phone.  I seem fine.  Thank you for that assessment.  I’m grateful that you can overlook my disabilities. 

I don’t believe they detract from what I do.  I believe they make it possible.  First, from a strictly financial point of view, there would be no way I could do this show if I had to work 40 or more hours a week just to pay rent.  My Disability check is tiny, and it keeps me from getting a job, assuming a job for which I could get paid even existed.  If I tried to work a 40-hour week at anything other than what I do, I would certainly be dead within a month.  You’d be surprised how few employers want a worker who needs to nap every six hours. 

They also make it possible from the Artistic point of view.  My depression is the author of “Horace’s Final Five.”  My experiences have made me into the man to whom you are currently listening.  My social disabilities have helped me to learn empathy.  I know what it’s like to be ridiculed for being different.  My insecurities help me to imagine how others may feel when they’re abused in some way for being different from the norm.  One of the reasons I argue so passionately and so frequently for the rights of marginalized groups is because I am a member of so many of them.  That sounds odd coming from a straight white male, but there is more to me, and to you, than conditions we never chose.

I’m also socially awkward, at the very best.  I’m a member of that group.  We’re easy targets, and we have to tolerate the laughter at our expense. 

I’m also a member of the group that can’t deal with rejection.  It’s easy to say we’re melodramatic, and for this reason we are not to be taken seriously.  But just as a lost Teddy Bear would mean almost nothing to most adults, to a 3-year-old it can be as devastating as the loss of a family pet.  The fact that other people don’t experience the world in the same way we do doesn’t mean their experiences are to be discarded.  The suffering is real.

I’m not, however, a member of the most notable marginalized groups.  I’m White.  That eliminates me from a vast number of marginalized groups.  I’m straight, and I have never felt the need to change my gender.  I’m also male.  My disabilities are nothing compared to those who are oppressed in groups of which I have never been a part.

That’s a fair point.  It’s also irrelevant.  It’s Whataboutism.  It implies that because other things are worse than my disabilities, mine don’t count.  I should stop complaining.  I’m actually not complaining about my life, though.  While there are many elements of it that suck, it’s mine to do with as I see fit in the time I have left to me.  Many people’s lives are better.  Many others are worse. 

I like to think I can feel empathy for those who are oppressed because, even though I’ve never experienced the specific abuses they must endure, I have an understanding of what it feels like to be mistreated for things that aren’t your fault.  I do what I can to stand up for them whenever possible.  I would like all people to live lives that are free from unwarranted judgments, and in which all their basic needs are met.  I would like mine to be the bottom of the scale instead of anyone being worse off than I am.   I work for that in all the ways I can. 

What would I like you to do?  I can’t speak for all disabled people.  My experience with disability is mine.  Other people’s experiences are different.  It seems to me, however, that the best thing we can do is to accept people as they are.  Try not to be repelled by variations.  Embrace them.  Celebrate them.  Recognize the richness of experience that comes from us all being so different from each other.  Don’t ridicule those who aren’t as attractive, or as intelligent, or as athletic, or as quick-witted, or who can’t walk, or see, or hear, or feel the same way you do.  Recognize our unique circumstances grant unique perspectives.  The more ways we see the world, the more paths open up for us to find meaning and Truth in the world. 

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations will create a painting of the world that is more beautiful, more honest, and more complete than anything we can produce while seeing through our single lens.  Before you hate someone, ask yourself what it must be like to be them.  Try your best to feel for those you normally reject.  This is how we will create the world in which everyone is loved, respected, happy, and alive all at the same time.  Isn’t that what we all really want?

And yes, I still love you.