We are Our Injuries

When we look at fellow human beings who have been hit by a physical disability, the impact on their lives is usually extreme. So extreme, that if we don’t know the people well, we will completely identify them with their disability, as if their personality could not reveal anything more important than their disability. We will finally refer to them with their disability, as if it were their name: the muco-kid, the softenon-baby, the old blind man, the guy who lost his hand, the lady in the wheelchair. It is as if the injury defines the person. The reason we do this, is because we are perfectly aware of the impact. Our brain is trained by millions years of survival to know that a serious injury can provoke exclusion from the tribe, and therefore death by starvation.

Being ‘normal’ people, we think we may escape from the stigma of injury, but we forget the trauma of mental injury. We know what it means to be excluded. This grows worse when we get older. Think of the elderly people you know. They all have their obsessions. They repeat them all the time. They often become zealots of a single cause that particularly hit them in the past. We know we will also become a caricature of ourselves - we already are. As the Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis once wrote: “Your character doesn’t wear off. It boils in. We all become a beef cube of our own soup.”

Yet there is also something beautiful about this. Our injuries are the most recognisable things about us. They are the grips through which other people hold us and cherish us. They make us who we are. 

I refer to my blog You are your Time and to my Dutch blogs The King’s Speech and to Lof der Zotheid.

Picture: Bernardo Strozzi, Tobit healed from his blindness by Anna, Rafaël and Tobias. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.