[I wrote these pieces over the last three or four years.  I was
looking through some of my files tonight and found them, and had a
bizarre urge to post them to the list, despite the fact I have a ton
of emails to reply to, and my back is hurting so much I shouldn't be
sitting at the computer, bizarre because I don't usually share too much
of my writing with a lot of people.  Put it down to pain-induced
egotism! --- Rayna]

It hurts.  It hurts to be discounted because of what I look like, and
because of what my body does not do.  It hurts to be shoved to the
back and side, out of people's sight.  It hurts to not be seen for who
I really am, simply because I do not live up to other's physical
standards of beauty, of grace, of ability.  It hurts to have people's
hatred and fear and disgust thrown at me like so much rubbish.  I may
not be able to walk or talk or think like you, but it still hurts to
know that this is what you judge me on.  My body may not be acceptable
by your standards, but I have a heart and and a soul, and a mind that
defies standards, and that choose to soar of their own accord into a
realm of life and living that those of you who judge me can never
enter.  So although you can hurt me, know that as long as my mind and
heart and soul can soar free, I will always triumph, you can never
destroy me.

The absence of love is the most crippling thing, the absence of people
who love us as we really are, love us for all our faults, and
imperfections, physical and otherwise.  If this is not there it takes
an awful lot of energy and strength just to get through each day, and
if your physical being is something that not even a mother could love,
then how can you expect anyone else to.  And even if they do, how can
you believe them.

It is a truth that people can die from a lack of love, lack of caring
human contact.  But we who are disabled are expected to live like
this, from birth til death.  We are punished because of others' lack
of humanity.  We are punished for their inability to see who we really
are, and we are punished for having to explain, constantly to these
people who we really are, having constantly to to defend our right to
exist, and knowing that while we are doing this, the very fact that we
have to do this is the reason that they are not listening.  And they
do not accept that this is their fault, that this is something that
they have caused.

We, who are forbidden to love others, to be loved by others, and worst
of all, forbidden to love ourselves.  We, whose hearts have not only
been broken, but ignored into invisibility, ignored into a blackness
and a darkness that we can never recover them from, we must find a
strength that others will not allow us, and pull back who we are from
our hearts and souls, from those parts of us that are ignored, that
are denied.  We must learn to love who we are.  (But in order to do
this we need to be loved by others for our true selves, it cannot ever
be an individual thing, for love must be enriched by connection).
[This paragraph was written two or three years before I joined this
list, but on re-reading, it goes some way towards saying what you all
mean to me, and why.]

The best way to steal something from someone, is to first deny its
importance, and make it seem worthless to them, to the one who owns it
so that when they throw it out you can easily take it (and at the same
time pretend that you had nothing to do with it - it was their choice
all along) and use it, and gain the full benefit of what it really
is.  In this way, they have stolen our strength, they have stolen our
ability to survive, and they use it for themselves.

And how are we supposed to live in a world that is too weak to sustain
the power that they do not see, and who cannot understand that the
lack of ability is theirs and not ours, that the weakness belongs to
them and not us and it is their heads that are cracking and oozing
when they fire at us with their words like bullets.  That when they
look at us and recoil in disgust they are looking into a mirror of
themselves.  They do not understand that we are all part of the same
whole and we are reverse mirror images of each other.  Our insides
reflecting the others outsides, and their insides reflecting our
outsides.