A good example for all of us who are getting older and have more physical limitations.
A now deceased colleague, Nancy Mairs, wrote of her decades-long decline (MS in her case) in 9 collections of gritty, powerful, sad-and-funny essays. Ms Ryan, you sound like her younger sister-under-the-skin
It's the highest compliment. She spoke of being 'waist high in the world,' writing when 'ableism' was barely on the horizon, and invisibilty, though not that of the flâneur, the fate of the "handicapped."
Travel well.
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Beautifully written. I so admire your spirit!
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To me, this sounds like a love letter to a city, Berlin, and the determination of a soul living there to do what the city has always done: get on with things. I admire the emotion and resilience--of both the city and the writer!
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I found this piecd interesting and beautifully written. Ultimately, however, where I think it falls short is in not returning to the idea of ableism and the sneaky way it can constrain the imaginations even of people who might identify as disabled. Early on the author writes, of the declined profile only a few years previous, “I didn’t know *then* about ableism,” etc. We go on to learn the author has been negotiating the world in a perhaps disabled, perhaps increasingly disabled, body for ... decades? But we never learn what, if not that set of experiences, opened the author’s eyes to deeply pervasive, even self-directed, ableist thinking. The piece becomes the inspirational “disabled traveler” profile the author initially refused to write of someone else but leaves unreckoned with the sneering refusal of those disabled women travelers and the author’s eventual epiphany—both of which I would be interested to read from a writer of this skill.
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Beautiful!
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Dear Marian,
Thank you so much for this wonderful article. You made my day. Disability is in the mind, not the body. Impossible is nothing.
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Nonsense. Disability is real, very real. It is not romantic. It is coping, 24/7.
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Ms. Ryan,
Thank you for this eloquent and moving essay. None of us know what life has in store for us. If I ever find myself no longer able to do what I have long been able to do, I hope I can muster the will to 'reconfigure my connection' to both my environment and life with the same spirit and grace that you display.
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I grew up in North Baltimore in the sixties in walking distance of two veterans hospitals. One was astride Northwood Baseball Leagues three little league diamonds where I and my brothers played for years. I never saw a veteran outside of that or the other facility which was closer to our municipal stadium.
I asked my father, who had two purple hearts from WW2, why we never saw the veterans. When I was younger my dad was evasive and later explained that many were bedridden or horrific to behold. And some, not as unlucky, didn't want to be stared at and perhaps pitied.
While studying history in high school I saw the photographs of French veterans of the Great War parading on crutches, in wheelchairs, making no attempt to hide their lost limbs or disfigurements. I wondered if we as a society exerted some subtle pressure to hide yourself away if you didn't appear whole.
I think we've come a long way since the American Disabilities Act. I don't see people groaning on the bus or complaining about ramps as much as I used to. Perhaps most of us are more mindful that someday we might be the one who needs it. When people got too old or cancer or another debilitating disease they disappeared to all but their families. It was like they were already dead to their communities.
It must make one brutally self conscious being new to a wheelchair but there are so many more out there. Some in the motorized chairs appear to be enjoying the city much like the ambulatory.
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Bravo - what a moving article! I will soon have one of my essays published online in BioStories which deals with the joys of walking and also of recognizing diminishing capacity. Your determination to continue in the role of flaneur, however, will persist and is an encouragement to everyone who has encounters difficulties.
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wonderful article
flaneurism a true joy
bon courage
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