People with extreme challenges often are better able to look through the superficial fluff of life and get to the point. There's often not enough time or enough energy to fluff around with unimportant stuff. I've seen that come out in people with addictions and those who are trying to recover from them, in people with major medical challenges and in people who have dealt with crisis and been drastically changed by it. A bit more intensity would probably be good for most of us, though some people would find it difficult to cope with us.
intense
Part of Speech: adjective Definition: forceful, severe; passionate Synonyms: acute, agonizing, all-consuming, ardent, biting, bitter, burning, close, concentrated, consuming, cutting, deep, diligent, eager, earnest, energetic, exaggerated, exceptional, excessive, exquisite, extraordinary, extreme, fanatical, fervent, fervid, fierce, forcible, full, great, hard, harsh, heightened, impassioned, intensified, intensive, keen, marked, piercing, powerful, profound, protracted, pungent, sharp, shrill, stinging, strained, strong, supreme, undue, vehement, violent, vivid, zealous Notes: emotions are intense while sustained application or attention is intensive; intense arises from within and intensive comes from outside (it is imposed or assumed) Antonyms: calm, dull, low-key, mild, moderate
A subtitle for this post might be How I have disabled friends.
I have a somewhat distributed life. And that means I don't see my friends all that often. Even if you discount the New York -San Francisco part of my life, I have friends in different countries, and all over the US. I even have friends who live close (say an hour or two away) to my hub cities whom I don't see all that often because travel is a hassle in itself.
I work hard to maintain my friendships long distance, and I like to think that I do so fairly well. That I am able to do so is usually a function of the fact that my friends and I have spent concentrated periods of formative time with each other. We went to university and/or grad school; we were roomates, worked the same kinds of jobs, etc. Now, we only see each other once a year or so, but we phone in, we send email, we talk ... For some people, this doesn't work -- I miss a crucial life event or we are not able to connect as often as necessary. Sometimes, it doesn't work because I, we, people change -- the foundation of our friendship becomes less relevant to one of us. I, for example, don't keep up as much with the world of my first job; my friend who works there still has had two children. We've found it very hard to keep some sense of connection going, and our friendship sadly is fading.
My disabled friends are also spread all over the country, yet they are different from my other friends. Many of you are people I have not spent any significant time with; some of you I have not met in person at all. And yet. I count you as my friends. I would love to have coffee with you, see a movie, drink a glass ... I probably won't get to do that, sadly. But our friendship I find vital in my life.
I am proposing a kind of crip friendship. I keep seeing stuff about how the internet is a great leveler, how it enables people to connect, etc. I am seeing this in a practical way. You, my crip friends, I barely know in your/our "real" lives. That doesn't diminish your importance to me: ours is a friendship of ideas, narrated experience, and spirit. No. Spirit. Ideas. Narrated Experience. SPINE. Ours are friendships of the spine.
Wow. Goose pimples. That just came to me.
Think, for a second, about the spine. It hosts the site of many of our vulnerabilities -- the spinal cord. And yet, as language would have it, it is the location of our courage. We have backbone; we show our spine. We are spiny, thorny, prickly, and, well, brave. The bony prominences of the vertebrae, its twists, its irregularities, its contractions, and flexibility and frozen flexions bear witness to the twists and curves of our relationships.
I may not ever see you in your world, but I am there in spirit; I will listen to your narrated experience and share my own. We can and will, I hope, engage in the deepest friendships of ideas. We will surge, float, and thunder through our ideas. And when we hang up the phone, disconnect the webcam, we will retreat back into our own lives, deeply and forever changed. The bone of the spine -- its ideas, its spirit, the narrating of its experience -- gives shape to the tissue and network of our lives. It supports us as we muscle through and literally gives us the nerve to do so.
If I seem intense, it is because I see our "spines" as being interwoven; we can't go to the coffeeshop or take a walk to build intimacy. Will you brace yourselves for the intimacy that comes with intensity? Can we build that brace so that it offers support in a moving way -- not in the correcting, reforming way of medical devices but in the way that allows our friendship to lift us both up to do something extraordinary.
If I shoot ideas at you rat-a-tat-tat, will you soak them up in spirit and engage with narration and experience? Because I do think it is important for us to connect with each other, to lightly peel back our skins and stare deeply at the bone. To fold the muscle back over those scores and seal the skin with new, soft tissue. I want to hold your hand, as we both look down through the scars to the nerves that make you move. I want you to restrain my muscle as we peer and probe, softly at first, down to the white grey bone of my spine.
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