On Rising and Gliding
The truth is: disability can happen to anyone at any time. Living through a disabling event or growing up with a disability does not make one heroic: it makes them human.
Greetings, friends. I'm Erin Ryan Heyneman. I left my career as an educator when, at 35 years old, I became disabled by a catastrophic Multiple Sclerosis Flare that left an apple watch face-sized a hole my brain. Acquiring a motor and cognitive disability shifted just about everything in my life: my priorities, my role as a mom, my relationships; even the clothes I wear and the food I eat changed dramatically. I write about what it's like to be disabled in the United States, where cultural script questions like "how are you doing?" have few polite and correct answers (fine or better!).
We live in a world where success is defined by personal progress and growth. As Kate Bowler says, "a world that loves us better when we are good, better, best." The truth is: disability can happen to anyone at any time. Living through a disabling event or growing up with a disability does not make one heroic: it makes them human. And if you're part of any marginalized group (but particularly if you're black), disability will only compound the difficulty of living in a white supremacist, patriarchal society.
I chose Rising and Gliding as the title for this project because I have always loved a particular line from Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." In the poem, the speaker attends a public lecture on astronomy to hear of the "facts and figures," of the universe. By the second stanza they are bored by stuffy academia. Whitman writes,
"How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,"
When we analyzed this poem in my English class, I'd ask my students how a person might "glide" and we'd have fun trying to reenact an easy, laid back stroll. Back then, I never thought about how a wheelchair or rollator glides. Or "how soon unaccountable," (out of nowhere) I might find myself tired and sick from the effects of Multiple Sclerosis. Or how, after my disabling event, I would become lonely and "by myself" a good amount of the time. Still, I find the internal rhyme of the "i" and "ing" sounds to be gentle and surprising to the reader.
I try to imagine myself rising and gliding when I awake each morning to a life that is not at all what I'd planned: gentle and open to the surprises of what comes next.