We need to project ourselves into the things around us. My self is not confined to my body. It extends into all the things I have made and all the things around me. Without these things, I would not be myself, I would not be a human being. I would merely be a human ape, a primate
Carl Jung
We all like to feel we are valued by others and have a sense of our own worth so when you become paralysed you can lose this and your identity changes. When I broke my neck I became defined by medical terms, I had become a SCI, C6/7, Frankel C – severe, but incomplete motor and partial sensory damage, with a grade 4 pressure sore as an afterthought. Lying in a hospital bed for months upon end, I was simply a horizontal static body in a ward with a plastic numbered NHS tag around my wrist costing money every day.
When I progressed to a wheelchair my stature had shrunk from six foot one to four foot five, with no choice but to sit on my arse all day. Defined as the inhabitant of a wheelchair, where the chair symbolises you like the stick figure fused to to the wheelchair in a disabled parking bay at Tesco’s. A body that cannot be separated from it and the object that identifies you but separates you as always and solely disabled.
Being able to walk upright on two legs is a big part of what defines us as human beings and a key distinguishing feature that separates us from our closest ancestors the great apes, whom we generally consider to swing around in trees and only able to walk on four limbs when they are on the ground, not having advanced to an upright bipedal existence. Walking on two legs allows the arms to become free to do other things.
A wheelchair gives you free membership to a group commonly known as The Most Vulnerable in Society but being an active member often means you get talked about a lot by others but because you are vulnerable, because you are disabled you are not really heard. Your voice and your intelligence appears to diminish with your stature and the extent of your disability.
One of the key measures of success in today’s modern consumer society that values who we are and identifies us is our economic worth and our contribution to GDP and the constant drive for economic growth. Celebrities dominate the media and their excessive lifestyles and spending are advertised as desirable. Their opinions are more often heard and to have more worth than any ordinary folk. Affluence increases the ability to influence. If you are clearly and visibly disabled and cannot hide your lack of wealth it is not hard to consider yourself and be widely perceived by others as a burdensome drain to the economy and hence worthless.
It is hard to overcome this physical and economic sense of being less able, less worthy and less valued but growing plants and watching them behave, develop and grow, as well as the other forms of life they attract provides a worth that is hard to measure and does not really fit on an economic scale.
I know that the time I and others have put into the garden is worth it; I know that the money I have spent on the garden, the manpower, the compost, the manure, the plants and the seeds is worth it; I know that the time I have spent learning and reading has been worth it; I know that it provides worth to people walking past. I know this every time I look out of my window and remember what was there when I first arrived and compare with what appears there now. I have no doubts that it has all been worth it, every bit of it. And it continues to grow. Try telling an economist that and they won’t bloody believe you.
