I think, if something is important enough to you, you find a way to do it – or something like it. Joni Erickson Tada broke her neck in a diving accident at 17yoa, and is a quadriplegic. She is now an accomplished singer, author, and artist. She holds the brush (pencil, etc.) in her mouth and paints (or draws) that way.

If you want something written for hammer dulcimer and recorder, I’m a composer by degree. ;)

I was thinking of mentioning that, because I always really have wanted to play guitar, but attempts to do so have resulted in large quantities of hand pain (not just from the carpal tunnel, but from the fact that my fingers just don’t bend that way). So I play things like hammered dulcimer instead.

Then I started falling out of them and breaking bones and stuff — I’d never even fallen before, let alone broken anything. And even though I kept climbing, it kept getting progressively harder to do all the movements involved, until eventually it was clear that it was too dangerous to continue.

It’s not that I don’t miss climbing trees, actually. But I don’t … how do I describe this? It doesn’t really take over my life, I rarely think about it anymore, and it’s not overly traumatic. I also discovered there’s a lot of things I can do with trees without climbing them, many of which I can do when I’m incapacitated in nearly every other way.

So… yeah, I don’t want to give the impression that not being able to climb them didn’t affect me at all, more that I put it in perspective, and found other things to do, or other ways to do things I’d done before.

Which is actually what most people do when they become disabled, so it’s not all that surprising that I did the same thing. I just find it amazing that there’s this incredible encouragement, from mostly non-disabled people, to wallow about it. When the same people would generally recognize it as wallowing if it was a non-disabled person.

Just like I would lament the loss of ability to climb a tree. It’s important to me. Maybe someday it won’t be. Apparently it isn’t to you. Simmilarily I am curiouse about the dulcimer, but I doubt I’ll ever try playing it. I don’t expect you to be terribly upset by this either.

I feel people need to learn to accept that there’s different ways of being, and there is no overarching value set.

I’m very good at being me, and my value set applies to who I am. I would be terrible at being you, my value set wouldn’t fit at all. I play classical guitar, not the hammered dulcimer! :)