This book brings together twelve autobiographies selected from an initial collection of 131 writings, which later grew to over 250. The subjects are people living with handicaps and disabilities who share their stories with remarkable candor.
Erika Schuchardt, the author, teaches pedagogy at the University of Hannover. For years she has devoted herself to the social integration of the disadvantaged through educational programs, academic research, and church initiatives.
In these biographical accounts, people struck by the most common handicaps—physical, psychological, mental—as well as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and other critical conditions describe their shattering experiences without reserve. (In some cases, parents tell of discovering their child's handicap and of the crises and countless attempts to navigate an existence so radically different from the rational, ordered life of the "healthy" and the "able.").
The majority of authors are women, perhaps because women feel more acutely the weight of critical conditions, the sting of isolation, and thus the need to seek relief.
This book speaks to those living directly with their own handicap or that of a loved one, but also to the non-disabled—so they might stop making excuses for their lack of sensitivity and openness in the face of suffering and existential anguish, which so often confront them in the workplace and in daily life.
What emerges from all these stories is also clear: the first step toward integration rests with the handicapped person as an agent. But ideally, the first steps would be taken together, by both the "healthy" and the "disadvantaged" alike, toward genuine meeting and the beginning of real dialogue.
In her introduction, Schuchardt outlines the fundamental problems facing people with handicaps and their families.
The first problem is the psychosocial confrontation of living with handicap in everyday life. What matters is accepting the harsh limitations that have transformed your very self—and in some cases, the inner work of learning to live with detachment from those limits.
The second problem is the silent marginalization of the disabled by those around them—at work, in how they spend free time, among neighbors, in public spaces.
Our society, with its measures of value based on profit, success, and shallow aesthetic conventions, tends to build walls against the disadvantaged and push them further to the edges. Even doctors, who should be guides helping a shattered life find the path to rebirth, often settle for being mere "comforters," trying to soften hard truths rather than facing them squarely. The third problem is refusing to give up—despite setbacks and the near-total absence of companions on the journey—in the search for a renewed way of living and in the acceptance and working through of one's crisis.
The encounter with countless daily difficulties, and the search—at first confused and chaotic, then more constructive and internalized—for meaning in one's existence, releases forces that endure for a lifetime.
Many of these authors have managed to build new value into their lives by dedicating themselves to other disabled people and by taking on grave responsibilities on their behalf.
The twelve biographies are so many precious testimonies from people who are disadvantaged—or their relatives—who, in order to process and live with their crisis, have faced very different journeys, shaped by different social backgrounds and levels of education.
Yet all these stories point toward a transformed understanding of life. From Iosef Forster, a young factory worker who, stricken with multiple sclerosis, must travel a long road before he can face hard truth, encountering doctors who are merely "comforters" or "concealers" of his real condition; to Birgit Poli, a spastic girl who describes the contradictory behavior of those around her; to the account of Dagmar von Mutius, a sixty-three-year-old librarian—these stories read like dispatches from "rooms without mirrors," where illness and the soul are something "different," just as we imagine the God we believe in to be different.
- Pietro Ciampi, 1992
===FINE===