“Here a great number of disabled people used to lie. . .” John 5:3.

This is hard to explain to anyone who is not disabled, although I think more people these days do understand that physically disabled people want to be treated as ‘normal’ - because indeed they are no different mentally and emotionally, just because some part of their physical body is unable to function properly.

For a physically disabled person it is extremely important to be allowed to ‘be themselves’ among able-bodied people - the only unavoidable differences being those forced by some physical limit. i.e. the need for a door to be opened or an item reached from a shelf.

So what do I mean by the above heading? It has to do with attitude on both sides. With all the willingness in the world, an able person’s efforts to treat a disabled person ‘as if’ they are not so, has to be clouded to some extent - mainly verbally. They may refrain from some comment because they feel it would be tactless - or they over enthuse about some simple achievement, which is non-physical and of no more credit to the disabled person than it would be to anyone else. In other words, for the disabled person, someone overdoing the ‘as-if-normal’ bit is about as bad as treating them ‘as-if-abnormal’ - and even if the best happy medium is reached most of the time, a bias still exists. It need not be one of thinking of the disabled person as inferior - just as often it is regarding them as superior, a sort of ‘I-could-never-have-coped-as-you-do’ attitude.

The disabled person may also have an added verbal limitation in that they feel they can’t, for instance, half joke in the way an able person would about some wild thing they’d like to do, because in fact it wouldn’t be possible - and can result in rather pityful responses.   Expressions of natural or emotional feelings by disabled people also seem to often embarrass able people - thus making disabled people reluctant to express themselves in the first place.

Now - if a physically disabled person gets on the Internet, whether it be e-mail, IRC chat or a newsgroup like ZFC, all such influences can be removed if they choose to not mention their physical state and simply be themselves.

This might seem at first dishonest - but is it? The ‘person’ is the spiritual being within a body - if some handsome athlete loses an arm or leg and his nose gets smashed, he doesn’t become another ‘person’. So not saying your body is disabled is no different from not saying what colour your hair is, how old you are or how much money you have. People communicating in this way can be totally free to be their real selves and transcend all barriers, becoming friends because of who they are and not what they are. The disabled person is no longer being treated ‘as if’ they are ‘normal’ - he/she ‘is’ normal in the true sense of the word, being their natural real self and expressing their true thoughts and feelings. The response of the other person is unaffected by the disabled person’s physical state.

The joy this can give a disabled person is immense. If an honest compliment is made, a kind word spoken, a gift sent - it is for themself, who they are. No wondering - ‘now was that really because they like me for myself or out of kindness because I’m disabled?’ It also means being able to express their feelings and desires openly, without invoking responses of pity, embarrassment or even amusement. These times of being able to be treated ‘as normal’ and not just ‘as if normal’, is like being in another world, albeit perhaps short-lived.

If such communication between two people eventually becomes a deeper friendship, the disabled person may feel they should explain their disability - especially if there’s a possibility they will meet, then it will be only fair to tell the other of their disability. But this will be a test of how genuine the friendship is, an advantage able-bodied people don’t have - and whatever happens then, nothing can take away from the disabled person the experience of having known what it ‘is’ to be normal, not just treated ‘as if’.