„When people think of me as resilient in the face of adversity, what they are really seeing is that I’ve learned to surrender to a deeper strength and protection than my own. That I have learned to simultaneously try my best to survive, but not be afraid of either life or death.
Which means I am doing something quite different from the „trusting that things will work out“ […] that a lot of highly privileged people do. Their privilege lets them sail through adversity that could kill someone like me, and then claim that this is because the universe likes them a lot. Just, no. That’s an insult to everyone who doesn’t survive. This is nothing like that. Danger for me is danger: I could live or die, come out unscathed or heavily damaged, anything in between. What I trust is not that I will come out of everything squeaky clean, alive, and happy. It’s rather that there’s a deep level of reality where even if I end up dead or damaged, my existence is connected to everything else and will always have happened. It’s hard (impossible) to explain in words, but it comes down to a connection to a kind of goodness that is lending its strength to you even if the worst happens.
This kind of submission can sound passive, but it’s an active process. And it can change how you relate to the world and to people in it.“
(Aus Amanda Baggs‘ Beitrag zum Disability Blog Carnival, Thema dieses Jahr: „Long nights and what we need to get through them.“)
