NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part Two

I thought I was attuned to the experience of being 'outside' of the inside, the working class oik at grammar school and university, bridging two worlds which did not understand each other; driven out of all the normal tropes of childhood by years of experiences of dark and depraved violence, knowing far too much about all the wrong things, acquiring a skill set no one should ever need; unapologetically a psychiatric patient, declining to hide behind the taboo.

And now I find I am being mocked in the street or on the bus by strangers, because my walking is so laboured, or glared at as if drunk or talked to as if retarded. And I'm slowly coming to realise this is a new outsider identity I've had forced on me - disabled.

I can be so slow about these things. I shouldn't be surprised. I've enough disabled friends through the years to know the reality, that people do stare, are rude, are discomforted by someone different or odd
looking and turn offensive from fear or anger. But all of a sudden it's me, quite proud of myself for having walked to the supermarket, who realises that there are a loving couple in their early 20s pointing and sniggering, while they mimic, sat down, my lurching shoulder movements. I stared back, she reddened and mumbled to him, they both looked away.

I've lost count of the number of times that shop assistants have waited for me to reach out for my change (or not waited and dropped it) while I try to say 'My arms don't go that far any more', and some will look at me like I'm being lazy or superior or maybe even racist, and then I'm leaving the shop humiliated, so useless I can't even collect my change without making a fuss. There's no dignity to this outsidership, no high ground of history to stand on, no narrative sense to transform it into resistance against lies and myths and ideology. I'm dragging around a hurting, broken carcass and the world wants an apology.

I am stuck with this reality defining the form of the art I can make, along with a host of other mundane stuff. I do not want it to define anything else about it. But that may be wishing thinking.

Ugh, self-pity is an ugly and worthless emotion.