Proud of Our Pain

Are we proud of our arthritis?

Proud?

Not usually a word associated with activities like taking a handful of pills every day, wiggling in our chairs because sitting still for more than a few minutes causes pain, or avoiding the physical activities which would give us away.

But is it a badge we wear like bypass patients who verbally wear their membership in the zipper club as they strut their vertical scar dividing their chest in half and them from the un-zipped.

So the answer is yes, we are proud at some level, of our arthritis - even at its most painful and emotionally and physically destructive. I think we're encouraged to be proud with words like "fight" and "strong" and "cope". While we're doing these things, we're becoming friends with our foe. We're applying positive energy to a negative environment, and that's sometimes how friends are made.

How ready are we to talk about our arthritis to strangers or to obsess about it with friends and family? Is this a manifestation of pride? And if it is, is it bad? Or is it is too much pride, and if so, then is a little bit of pride ok, or even healthy?

As a dog, dedicated to making my caregiver's life pleasant, I'm proud. It's an energy that works for dogs, but, for some reason doesn't always work for humans. There's a lenticular phenomenon with pride. Angled just right it's appreciated. Just look at the Iditerod teams. Winners or losers, these dogs are proud, and they wear it well. Look at the Special Olympics or the Gay Games. Win or lose, these athletes are proud and their positive energy abounds. But cant the angle the other way and pride, translated by your observers, turns ugly. When the same special Olympic athlete looks for a date, when the lesbian tells her family she'd rather marry the girl next door, when the Jew wears his yarmulke into the truck stop, or when the arthritic, who might look perfectly normal, slows the line at the ski lift, pride, often unconscious, is translated into a threat. So what's happening here?

Well, unlike dogs, humans have an irrational composite discrimination quotient which they apply to each other. The greater the number of negatively perceived attributes, the more likely it is that pride will be perceived as arrogance or a threat. The most heavily weighted attribute is when someone obviously lives in multiple universes like the healthy and unhealthy worlds of a person with arthritis, or the gay and straight worlds, or the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. The author Leonard Fein says "not ever being fully at home is part of who we are - and not such a bad part at that. To be a Jew has always meant to live in two (or more) worlds at the same time. And more: Who can wish to be fully at home in a world so disorganized as ours? Is it not healthy, in such a world, to feel dislocated?"

As a dog, I think I see that it is probably healthy for humans to feel dislocated, and maybe to compensate for this feeling of rootlessness with a conscious display of pride. And it seems to me that as much as humans who have arthritis are forced to straddle the world of the healthy and unhealthy as part of their psychological abloutions, they are, as are the Jews, and the Muslims, and the homosexuals, and the geeks, and the conservative at Oberlin or the liberal at Dartmouth, forced to temper their pride before it becomes a threat to the dynamic majority in any specific situation.

Tempering takes energy, and so the Jewish boy, whose yarmulke is part of his personality at home is reminded that his pride threatens others as he bounces into the Montana truck stop to play five minutes of video games. And so tempering leads to censorship and then psychic retaliation, and before humans know it they're angry enough to stay sick, and they aren't likely to bite someone to relieve the stress.

I know a human who says he tells everyone he is gay because it educates and reduces stress.

"Everyone?" I said.

"Yes," he said, and went on to recount several stories of incredibly positive results from telling the most unlikely people he was gay. As he talked it was clear that he had found the path to energizing himself as well as others around him with his pride. But he admitted to one instance of not revealing his sexual orientation.

"What's that," I asked?

"I was naked in a sauna with Pat Robertson , Jeffery Dahmer, and Trent Lott who were discussing hell, dinner and civil rights.

"When I woke up, I called the front desk, told the operator I was gay, and vowed not to eat the entire contents of the non-refrigerated portion of the minibar again."

So are we proud of our arthritis? That's not the question.

The question is, do we energize ourselves and others with our pride?