Don’t worry…
I have heard people talk about disability ever since I was a little girl, I remember that at the time it seemed “normal” to me to hear talk of children like myself
For your mother you are a guilty conscience
For your father you are a child that always has to be re-born
For the society you are an economic burden
For a doctor you are a body to cure
For the school you are a “special case”
For the caregiver you are a job
For the other person you are not there…
For yourself you are a limit or in other words… a problem
Therefore….. The barrier exists in every one of us.
The solution to the so-called problem seems to be one: healing.
And if healing were not possible, how to deal with it?
We were seen not as children who had a problem, but as children who were a problem.The word “problem” dominated the word “child”, child was an adjective and “problem” or its synonyms were a noun. The majority of disabled people, over the course of their existential path, tend to subvert this barrier, that is, that they are not the problem, but rather they have a problem.
Santina Portelli
Seminary
University Bicocca of Milano, Sapienza University of Rome
