I arrived a day early, to train a little and meet the folks from Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sport, one of the East Coast’s premiere skiing and racing outfits. Up until now, I’d been skiing mostly on my own and hadn’t yet met many adaptive skiers. There were thirty other racers in the field. Would they be good … would I be good? Walking into the lodge to register, I began to see and size up the competition. There were amputees. There were paraplegics. There were blind skiers. My first thought was, I can win this thing.
My second thought was, wow, look at all these people with all these challenges. What could have happened to make that person blind? Was it an accident? Was he blind at birth? What would I do if I were in a wheelchair, blind or somehow mentally challenged? I mean, what am I doing here? Look at me, I’m … well … I’m … and then, it hit me.
I’m missing an arm and a leg. Eternally modified by a single moment in time. But in that moment, with all those people there, I completely forgot about my “disability” (more on that misnomer later) and was consumed with empathy for all these other poor racers in the room. I realized that my “whole body image” had not been injured or “dismembered” (more on that one, too) at the time of the train wreck, or even during my recovery afterward. My body image at that moment was still the one I had of myself at age twenty-two, exercising like a freak, learning photography, and being unconditionally narcissistic.
But in that room—484 days, thirteen hours and thirty-three minutes after the accident—my body image was, and continues to be, existentially altered. I no longer was Hercules. I am a modified Achilles, who has somehow survived his crippling blow. But the farther I get from that tragic day, the less dismembered and disabled I feel—and the more modified for bionic optimization I have become.
But what about the poor folks in the lodge? All those horribly injured souls. I felt that the majority of them considered themselves regular Joes and Josephines as much as I did, and I felt an out-of-body empathy for everyone else in the room. A room full of immortal Achilleses, back from the dead, wounds perpetually healing and psyches happily suspended somewhere between the way they were before, the way they felt the day their lives were remarkably altered, and their realization of the astonishingly adaptive and compassionate people they’ve become.
