My insoles and sneakers are starting to wear down and need replacing. Until I get together the executive functioning and budgeted cash to replace them walking will become more and more painful and tiring for me—due to my flat feet. It makes me think about how, like glasses, modern footwear and orthopedic insoles are a type of assistive technology so normalized that we no longer consider flat feet to be a true disability. When I was 9 the pain from walking with flat feet became so severe I needed physical therapy and couldn’t walk very far until we got shoes with strong arch support. It sounds silly these days when we hear that flat feet was a disqualifying condition from being drafted, like it’s a made up minor issue you’d tell them to get out of the draft, but before we had modern footwear and orthopedic insoles it truly was debilitatingly painful to have flat feet. It sounds so silly to call shoes a mobility aid but they really are a mobility aid, one that is used by everyone, so we don’t think of them as being akin to forearm crutches or a wheelchair. Because everyone wears shoes, nobody sees that my shoes contain a secret extra mobility aid for a secret health condition that is so manageable by just spending more on shoes than other people do that it’s not really considered a disability anymore. The only thing really disabled by it is my fashion sense, since most fashionable footwear doesn’t have good arch supports and won’t fit orthopedic insoles.
Your feet are very important. Flat feet don’t just cause your arches to hurt. Everything in your entire body starts with standing on your feet. If your feet are out of whack, it messes with your gait and posture in ways which will make every part of you hurt. As a child, I didn’t even think it was my feet that were the problem. What I told my mom was that my ankles hurt. As an adult I had gotten so used to wearing orthopedic footwear that I forgot how important it was for to wear. Once I was buying my own shoes, I started wearing sick punk ass Doc Martens as was the fashion at the time among cool people. It was so fashionable you’d have trouble finding your shoes in the pile of everyone’s docs at the party. But soon my hips and knees starting hurting so severely that I had started using a cane—which was a terrible idea. Never just start using a cane on your own without consulting a professional on how to use it and if it’s appropriate for your particular issue cuz it’ll fuck you up and make everything hurt even worse. The chronic pain got so severe that I once again found myself incapable of walking very far and back in physical therapy. The physical therapist told me to ditch the docs and the cane, and to wear sensible sneakers with stroke arch and ankle support and to use orthopedic insoles. “How would this help my hip and knee pain? And my back pain?” I asked. Everything starts with your feet. I took her advice and at first walking hurt even more because I had stopped being used to the sensation of arch supports pressing up on my feet. But then I got used to them again and it was incredible how quickly my pain got so much better. Over six months I went from barely able to walk a block to able to walk a mile with ease. Because the right footwear was the assistive technology necessary for me to walk. A mobility aid so normalized in our society that I took it for granted. I still needed physical therapy for my generalized hypermobile joints that had deconditioned and needed stabilizing, but the difference between the docs and the sneakers was stark, and as effective as a year of physical therapy.
I had also done the same thing with my glasses. As a teenager I had been diagnosed with a minor astigmatism and given glasses. The difference between wearing glasses and not was so minor that I pretty much only ever wore them while driving or in class to see whiteboards. I have a cognitive visual disorder (double vision, diagnosed as a kid) that I had needed vision therapy for but because of modern medicine I had treated it and didn’t think about it as a disability or anything that still mattered. Well, one day as an adult I started getting awful eye strain and headaches every single day. I’d be fine in the morning but by the end of the day my eyes and head would hurt so bad I couldn’t keep my eyes open and resorted to using a screen reader on all my devices for about a month or so until I could see an optometrist for the first time in my adult life. I went in thinking I must have been developing some terrible and awful rare condition that would make me lose my eyesight forever…. And instead the optometrist just said “irl, you have astigmatism, wear your damn glasses. You’re making it worse by straining your eyes trying to see without them. It’s asymmetrical too so without correcting it you’re exacerbating your double vision and making it harder to keep a single image. This is why it hurts to keep your eyes open all day.” So she wrote me a new glasses prescription and I started wearing glasses all the time and the problem completely went away. I took glasses for granted as an assistive technology that was necessary for me to function. Before we had glasses, this truly would have been a disabling health condition preventing me from reading and seeing for an entire day, but because of my glasses I’m just not disabled by it.
It’s such a strong example of how it is society that disabled and enables. Were other mobility aids like forearm crutches and wheelchairs as normalized as orthopedics, and our buildings built with that expectation, then the need for them would be far less disabling.
Ableism is such an interesting thing too because everyone is only ever temporarily or conditionally able bodied. Any day you could be hit by a car and become disabled, chronically or acutely. The longer you live, the higher the likelihood something like this will eventually happen to you, just statistically speaking, and as we all age our health will always be affected by that process and most people will develop some sort of disability in their elder years. All privilege requires some level of ignoring the plight of others but ableism requires somehow believing in your own sheer luck—that nothing bad is going to happen to you and you will never grow older. Sure, those invalids who are not useful to society any longer are unlucky enough to be born with or acquire a disability but that will never happen to me.
I already had some disabilities going on physical and mental, but this had been extra on my mind since my accident. Tripping and hitting my head on a radiator has caused a moderate concussion taking me out of work for at least three months and may have lasting consequences for at least the next few years of my life if not the rest of it. Brain damage is a big deal. There’s no narrative to my fall. It’s not something that was a long time coming. It’s not something that could have been foreseen. I just tripped by sheer chance and it ruined a bazillion plans and left me unable to remember who the president is. The cognitive impairments are so pronounced that people around me have been commenting on improvements they’ve noticed on things I wasn’t even self aware enough to see as having been affected by the concussion. Doctors saying I passed tests I didn’t know I’d failed before. People telling me I “seem more lucid” when I didn’t realize I wasn’t before. This total accident left me so disabled that I was completely dependent on others for a lot of crucial things like getting food, making minor decisions, etc. I became more disabled in such a major way with no possible way to have foreseen it. And if the accident had been just a little worse, it could have taken me out of work forever, left me unable to work ever again, the entire trajectory of my life changed forever. It’s something that could happen to literally anyone, and so shouldn’t we want a society that is accessible enough that you feel OK that, were it to happen to you, you would still be able to live in society?
Anyway that is my incoherent stream of consciousness for today. My writing is usually more directed and structured than this but alas, brain damage. This is me trying to push myself so I can rebuild my writing skills again. Writing is something I’ve always thought of as one of my strongest talents but I haven’t been able to do it without lots of headaches and pain and difficulty with thinking and word finding, so I have to rebuild the skill. You never know what can happen.
