The nature of disability: Finding a personal place of comfort

Things like hiking, biking, climbing, just aren’t accessible

This afternoon, in the corporeal world, my office consists of a damp, moss-covered log, an endless, lush green forest-view, and the sounds of northern wildlife. The small stream that trickles beside this campsite has since evaporated due to vegetation from the last year, but a five-minute walk across the road would lead me to a channel where I could send myself off in a canoe. The sun shoots glares off the screen of my laptop, but the warmth feels kind, unprejudiced, and refreshing on my olive skin.

This afternoon, in my own physical embodiment, my office consists of my legs perched on either side of the log, tilted at just the right angle so the solid surface doesn’t irritate my leg too much; although the pain has been seeping in since this morning’s early hours, something that never does go away. My back has begun to ache more prominently since sitting down, but I can’t bring myself to leave the comfort of Mother Nature’s simple fallen tree. My eyes squint slightly from the light of the sun coming at me sideways, and it makes my eye shake in protest, but I don’t want to move. My ears struggle to focus solely on the sounds of nature, and I am reminded why music thrumming through my ears 24/7 is so crucial to my sanity – tinnitus makes the shrill birds’ calls amplified and painful. The reoccurring thought passes through my mind again that hearing aids are on the horizon.

No matter how I look at it, I have always been a disabled woman. Although I often forget, because my prosthetic right eye has nearly always been a part of my existence, this is an identity I now comfortably acknowledge and openly portray.

Since becoming a person with a mobility-based disability – as well as the other new disability of being hard of hearing, as well as living in a state of chronic pain – I have been forced to become attentive to the fact that my relationship with nature has now become more complex.

The most basic things that I love to do within nature are not, in fact, accessible to my mobility limitations. Things like hiking, biking, climbing, just aren’t accessible activities. Even canoeing can be stressful because I have to plan ahead of time walking from land to water, when to switch to my water leg, where to keep my walking leg so it stays dry, etc.

From my own experience, being disabled is largely about planning ahead. In a way, this attributes to people in the disabled community being more time-efficient, but it also recognizes that our planning is based around the core idea that we live in an ableist society. If we lived in a world where ramps, braille, closed-captions, and kindness (etc. etc.) were the standard, we would all be better off. Disabled people, alas, would cease to be an afterthought.

This is why over the years, nature has become more and more of an escape for my physical self. Though a lot of the activities I like to do are not accessible, I feel free to accommodate myself without judgement because the world could not help but have roots, and fallen trees; whereas stairs were something made and designed to maintain oppression. I take comfort in the natural world, and in doing so this relationship is reflected in me, by how I carry myself from day to day.

So my food-for-thought for you this week, reader, is where is this place of comfort for you? Is it the concrete jungle, or a field of tall grass and friendly looming trees? Is it somewhere in-between, or a bit of both? It doesn’t matter which you prefer, so long as you are willing to contribute to making new structures available for all, not the few.