“My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.” -Stephen Hawking
“My advice to other disabled people is to focus on the things that disability doesn’t prevent you from doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.” -Stephen Hawking
Mens sana in corpore sano, whether a person isable-bodied or with a visible or invisible disability. The narrative since ancient times has read “a healthy mind is the fruit of a healthy body”-where healthy does not mean normalcy but well-being, and “a healthy body is the fruit of a healthy mind.” Perhaps these are truisms to which neuroscience now agrees: endorphins that are released after physical activity, oxytocin that is released in team games due to a sense of belonging, and serotonin that is produced after a recognition of prowess with oneself or others.
And how to correlate storytelling with sports in disability? It is also thanks to sports that people with different abilities can change their worldview, that is, the story they tell to themselves and others: in fact, quoting one of the greatest neurologists who is an expert in residual well-being, Oliver Sacks, individuals with disabilities who play sports no longer focus only on “shortcomings,” “the deficits,” but on what they can instead accomplish with their functionality to be enhanced. From a still, immobile, and grief narrative about “loss” (of chaos) we move to an evolutionary, moving, and questing narrative (of quest ) that emphasizes a body no longer “not up to par,” but a strong body and a spirit determined to explore an “unknown” body language. It will require new gestures, new solutions, and new contacts between bodies and the elements of water, air and earth. And with other human beings.
From the narratives of people with disabilities, it emerges that discovering new worlds previously little explored such as the arts including painting, music, theater, creative writing has the great power to bring out the marks left and absorbed in the everyday life of living with what is slangily and violently called an impairment: the suffix minus- stands for a diminution, the opposite of plus- an augmentative situation. The arts are capable of bringing out the plus, the creative performance, the acquisition of well-being in beauty, the transformation of the person’s self.
The same is true of sports, which places the challenge on the body and what one can succeed in achieving through daily commitment, effort, discipline, and competition with oneself: recognition comes, Paralympics or backyard gym, artistic performance at La Scala, or neighborhood theater, who cares: social recognition and belonging are everywhere as the ability to witness that one can live and smile with different abilities.
When a trauma, accident or injury happens, a psychologist or counselor is often called into the team to help the person process their situation. It can be helpful, but from what we know of people with disabilities it is not enough and can-if too much attended to-be counterproductive: it is too often the conversation between-and let’s forgive the labels-a normal person and a person with different abilities. And it is often the normal person who holds the psychotherapeutic session for the person with a disability. As Rita Charon teaches us, there is a “divide,” a barrier that separates the two figures, and it is really complex to be authentically welcomed by someone who has had the experience of trauma: one can never be an equal, even with a great deal of empathy.
I will tell an anecdote that was given to me years ago by the then president of the Spinal Cord Injury People Association in the UK whom I had the pleasure of interviewing: he told me about his accident when he was 16 years old that led to him no longer walking and living in a wheelchair. As part of the treatment protocol there had been several meetings with psychologists, occupational therapists, many people of good will: nothing, for two years he had taken refuge like a Hikikomori in his room, and would not know how to leave the house. One day when the family was out (but it was his wonderful family who had arranged everything) he hears the door ring: at first he does not want to open it, then he looks out the window and sees a young person in a wheelchair. She goes to open it for him: this one leans on the wheels with the muscles of his arms and with a leap makes the wheelchair go up past the two steps that were next to the slide for disabled people. He actually ignored the ramp to show that for him to jump two steps to get inside the house was something possible; the boy takes a good look at him, recognizes him, and yes he is a volleyball champion at the national level. the future president of the association of people with spinal cord injury is left speechless, filled with amazement. And he told me “from that day on I stopped complaining, my family understood that I needed authoritative and credible experience, someone who had gone through and beyond-passed what I was experiencing; seeing that another’s body could defy the scales was the gesture-that gesture-that I chose to work as a garden manager in a nursery. More than Freud and the Rogersian approach (counseling) volleyball could.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the volleyball champion who welcomes this request to help kids with disabilities locked in their homes. Not only is he a champion-and maybe before the accident he was not-and already this is a first transformation of the self-but he plays an active role in society, he becomes a credible witness to narrate his own metamorphosis overcoming the victim and victimhood mindset: fragility and vulnerability are part of human nature but as the champion and then the gardener did first, they focused through example still on that last gesture that the body can still do, the last thought that the mind can still dream. Here is generative thinking, of the plus, which puts in the background the suffixes dis- (of duplicity) and minus- term that needs no further explanation.
