Disability and Identity

Overcoming Perfectionism

Freedom from fantasy is the beginning of human liberation. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood

Some of our best moral learning comes through sharing and listening to narrative accounts of how people learn to live well. Narratives convey the constitutive moves that either enable or disable us from thriving in our relationships with others, but ethics are what claim to inform our aspirations with respect to others. In this article, I will draw from my own experience with multiple disabilities while inflecting this narrative with three very different relational stories that are told - and recommended to us - via ethical theories. Relational stories are those that ethicists use to convey what we are capable of within interpersonal relationships. In particular, I will explore the relational stories told in Emmanuel Levinas's notion of a one-sided obligation in the "face of the Other," John Rawls's Kantian construction of the conditions of reciprocity behind the "veil of ignorance," and Aristotle's disclosure of genuine mutuality between "noble" friends. Finally, I conclude with the implications of the narrative I tell for living well both as an academic and as a teacher.

DISABILITY AS FORMATIVE OF IDENTITY

As a twelve-year-old girl, I loved to ride my bicycle. I rode for miles, often spending the whole day riding between my grandparents', cousins, and friends' houses. When day was done, I had to ride up a very long, tough hill to get back home. I fantasized that I was in a competition, that the event's announcer was wondering aloud if I had it in me to best my competitors. I was just ahead of the pack, and so I didn't dare allow myself to let up, even for a moment.

Because both of my parents were avid golfers, I was encouraged to work on my game, and I did. In fact, I tried to perfect it. Carrying a full set of clubs, I often played the entire course by myself. I had insanely high standards for myself. Whenever I hit a bad ball, I chastised myself, furiously reviewing techniques on how to do better with the next shot. This dedication had to do with more than simply my desire to play golf with my parents and be a part of their world; I had something else to prove because I am congenitally hearing-impaired.

When I misheard crucial dues in the drift of a conversation, my contributions were non sequiturs, so I often felt left out of what was going on. This created a lot of pent-up desires and needs socially, emotionally, and intellectually, which fostered a fierce determination on my part to compensate for a keen sense of inadequacy. In the domain of physical activities, where listening was not necessary, I excelled. In school and in certain social settings, though, I felt clearly out of my league. Unable to fully participate, I experienced a despairing acquiescence in what I doubted would ever truly involve or include me. Feeling stifled was in turn translated into an elaborate fantasy life, an imagined form of perfectionism concerning exactly how things ought to be. Together with Walter Mitty, I created a fantastical interior arena in which to enjoy my own agency, always imagining an heroic level of performance.

This mental imaging of "how it oughta be" was also formative of my need for theory. I identify with bell hooks when she writes:

I came to theory because I was hurting - the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend - to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.1

But the options for expressing this need were at that time rather narrow for me. As a teenager I became a radical fundamentalist Christian. This commitment lasted until my early twenties. The elaborate theological theory of this belief system accomplished several purposes for me. It seemed to explain the guilt I felt over being attracted to other girls, although, in fact, I felt depraved. The Christian doctrine also had the unconscious appeal of allowing me to be better than my parents, or at least "better off," as we used to say in church, because we felt forgiven. For this, I needed no less of a guarantor than the Creator of the universe.

When I was sixteen, I traveled around the country putting on judo and karate demonstrations and preaching the gospel. One member of our group would sing, especially when we performed at churches. She once collaborated with a local musician, a bass player, performing old gospel songs that lent themselves to being jazzed up, and they did, just a bit. However, it was emblematic of our increasingly spiritualized sensibility that she later regretted having done this. She put this vividly when she said that it is wrong, "whenever the song hits your foot before your heart." So, tapping your foot is suspect.

As a member of groups disparaged based on the body being both disabled and lesbian, it's not surprising that I was attracted to a disembodied way of being. But these absolute standards for behavior only accentuated my own perfectionism, tied as they were to my old compensatory need to overcome all challenges because I was partly deaf. Indeed, even after I shed my Christian identity, I retained this drivenness, which was essentially a form of grandiosity.