No more running and jumping

Suppose you’re an attractive, athletic young philosophy student who loves horsing around, playing sport, bonking girls and hitting the road. One day, as you’re riding your motorbike through Mexico, you do, actually, hit the road. Next thing you know, you can’t move anything below your nipples.

People tell you, your life’s not over. You can still party with your friends, read, write, philosophise. Have sex, though you won’t feel it. Be loved.

You swallow it, for a while. You try. But the mechanics of life as a quadriplegic get to you. You can’t control your waste functions, for instance, and that – to you – is embarrassing, time-consuming and disgusting. All the physical things you used to enjoy are now off the menu. It’s hard to romance girls when you’re liable to shit yourself at any moment.

So you decide life as a quadriplegic is not for you. You write an extensive essay on your condition and daily life, explaining the truth about your situation as you see it. And then you take a kitchen knife, slice yourself open (luckily you can’t feel a thing) and die of blood loss.

It’s an awful, tragic story, but one of the things that struck me while reading this guy’s pre-suicide essay was his commitment to the idea of ‘truth’. His truth, obviously, was that his own life was unlivable, but he also wrote that the ‘disability’ community is untruthful when it claims that life with a disability is somehow better than, or even equal to, life without one. Make the best of having no legs if you have to (he says) but don’t pretend it’s a blessing in disguise. Acknowledge that for every person living with severe disability there’s a bunch of people enabling them – often at considerable expense – to do so. Face it, you can’t ‘climb’ Everest in a wheelchair. Stop insisting that life is always worth living; sometimes it’s just not.

The concept of ‘truth’ is bandied about a lot these days; so it ever was. ‘We live in a post-truth world’ is tremendous bullshit considering that for most of the last two millennia we all went about believing that kings had divine right, Saint Whatsit’s fingerbone could cure cancer and God made the world in seven days. We’ve always lived in a world where truth is subservient to ideology, at least till it punches you in the gut.

Absolute truth is confined to things like gravity and the ill-effects of being squashed by a falling boulder; for the rest, we have to put up with truth being a matter of probability, something you search for but can never quite put your finger on. Still, I think we owe it respect; not to go arsing about with claims like ‘Well it ought to be true and so…’ or ‘I wish it were true and so…’ or ‘If it’s important to you that it be true then let’s all pretend that it is,’ or ‘according to this pre-determined tenet of Marxist/feminist/gender-fluid/Christian/Moslem/racial ideology such and such must or must not be true, and anyone who suggests otherwise should be cancelled/beheaded/sacked’.

So to suggest (as this guy did) that severe disability is unpleasant for the person who has it and expensive and time-consuming for the people who care for that person, is probably true, as far as it goes. To argue that therefore everyone with a severe disability should take his course of action (as this guy didn’t) is a step beyond – it’s not about truth, but values. But our values shouldn’t blind us to truth; if anything, we should look the truth in the eye and say, ‘Ok, I acknowledge that such and such is probably true/false, but I’m going to ignore that and do my thing, come what may!’

So maybe there’s close to zero chance those fingerbones will cure my cancer – but prayer makes me feel good. So biology made me a man – I’m going to make like a woman anyway! It’s a bummer being a quadriplegic, but I’m going to try and enjoy it, so there.

Or to quote the Orange Man, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any votes.’ Now that’s the unashamed truth.

Need a hot duke or a saucy duchess to dream on this month? Me neither, but you can pick up Pandora’s Jar free, if you enjoy a spot of Byzantine adventure, at the Timeless promo (and while you’re at it you can buy the sequel, All The Evils, for $0.99 here till the end of Jan 23).