Friday, May 1
By Katherine Schneider, for the CVPost
For the 80 percent of people who don’t have a disability, “Safer at Home” can give you some feel for what life with a disability is like.
I’m don’t mean the illness parts but, rather, the lifestyle pieces. Reactions to the pandemic include: fear for personal safety; helplessness; isolation; loss of control; anger at arbitrary decisions made for you; self-doubt and dependence— the same as reactions to a new disability.
Those of us who live with a visible disability, or whose invisible disability is known to others, sometimes have a social bubble around us. People don’t speak or sit by us if other choices are there. Six foot social distance was observed long before the coronavirus.
“Safer at Home” produces much the same feelings – the longing for connections and the loneliness of surface rather than deep connections.
What a ‘new normal’ might include
Think about how you’ll use your experiences to make a better world for people with disabilities when you get back to normal after the pandemic.
A new normal could include: more online meetings so people who have difficulties traveling can attend, more stores delivering to homes, more making connections with people who are isolated and more emphasis on “we are in this together.”
We can create a better world for 100% of us post-pandemic.
Having to make complicated plans and simple chores taking more time, energy and money – these are also similar experiences for people with disabilities and nondisabled people experiencing “Safer at Home.”
Ordering supplies far ahead, asking others to do something for us that we used to do, and not being able to do what you want when you want are also similar. Sadness and resentment follow.
Coping with the ‘Safer at Home’ disability
From my 70 years of expertise with the disability life, I offer the following possible strategies for coping with this “Safer at Home” disability:
- Try to find humor in the situation; rehearse the stories you’ll tell your grandkids about how you coped (or didn’t).
- Concentrate on what you can do including how you can help others. Sure, have a pity party about how you can’t do this or that, but then find something you can do even if it isn’t much. Can you forward a joke, call a friend, clean one drawer?
- Think how this is making you a better person, even if you don’t want to be a better person: More patient? More grateful? More empathetic?
We can create a better world for 100% of us post-pandemic.
To read previous instalments of “The Corona Chronicles,” click here.
The home page image is a representation of a coronavirus cell.