Suffering From...

My jaw throbbed.  Rubbing it with my hand seemed to have no good or bad effect:  the pain was deep and untouchable.  Because the pain was genuinely unanticipated, there was no residue of anxiety to alter my experience of it.  Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.
                              Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy,  p. 16
     Lucy Grealy describes the initial feelings she had shortly after seriously injuring her jaw in an accident.  Lucy told me why I have responded to "suffering from" out of the mouths of other people in reference to individuals with disabilities.
    Was I being fierce?  Was I being defiant?  Maybe.  Yet, that has never satisfied my response, living with cerebral palsy, and epilepsy.
     My response to my cerebral palsy has evolved.  By nature, cerebral palsy has been my intimate since birth.  My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck five times at birth.  Oxygen was deprived from the left side of my brain, which controls the right side of my body.
     For the first forty years of my life, I presumed that I would have the same capacities I had had since birth.  I anticipated no changes in my capacities as I aged, much less that my capabilities would be diminished at an accelerated rate.  Yet, that accelerated diminishment is precisely what I am living.
    I would divide my response to my cerebral palsy into two time periods--1960-2000, and 2000 through the present time.  Up until I was 40 or 45, I resisted reference to anyone with a disability as suffering from their respective disability.  Lucy Grealy just explained to me why I responded as I did.
    Anxiety or anticipation regarding a condition which has always existed is not possible.  I resisted "suffering from," because I was not anxious about how to live my life with full use of my left hand only.
     Different from living with the conditions I have had from day one, recent years have called for different adaptations.   Suffering from was an amplification for pity in my early understanding.
     Within the past ten years, I have come to a different understanding.
     Suffering from is not a sentence to be served.
     Suffering from is a journey to be navigated.