My Body Is Not a Prayer Request by Amy Kenny

Author:Amy Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Disability/Christianity;People with disabilities—Religious life;Church work with people with disabilities;REL012110;REL109000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Whenever I’m informed that I’m oversensitive for asking someone to stop using disability slurs or metaphors, I wonder what the barometer for sensitivity is. Is there an accepted rubric somewhere I don’t know about? Casting me as oversensitive assumes that microaggressions are overblown. Microaggressions are like mosquito bites. When you rarely get bitten, they aren’t a big deal. Sure, your skin is itchy and a little puffy, but after a day of intermittent scratching, you erase the incident from your memory with ease. Mosquito, who? Microaggressions are dismissed as minuscule, like mosquito bites, because they seem fleeting.

But when you are bitten dozens of times in a day, mosquito bites are less of a pest and more of a pestilence. Goose bumps spread across your body: persistent prickly tingles on your every hair follicle. You are no longer able to hear anything except the pulsing nettles nagging your raw skin. “Scratch me,” the bites beckon—louder, shriller, rowdier, until it’s all you can hear.

When your body is littered with mosquito bites, your awareness of their puffy, itchy presence is intensified. Mosquitos might be mini, but their impact, especially en masse, can be monumental. The mosquito is the most dangerous animal on the planet, killing more humans every year than any other animal.2 To brush them off as pests simply because they are pesky is ignorant. It focuses on their minuscule size instead of their mammoth impact.

My skin is a mosquito minefield.

“You’re such an inspiration,” a classmate applauds me. “I would kill myself if I had what you have.” Bite.

Someone at my church “names and claims” that if I just had enough faith, I could rise out of my wheelchair. Bite.

A stranger cusses me out in the Target parking lot, yelling that I’m not really disabled. I’m just faking it for pity. Bite.

Channel surfing in the car on the way to work one Monday, the radio blares, “There’s a lot of lame guys out there.” Bite.

“You should be so grateful for your husband,” a friend enlightens me. “Not everyone would put up with your disability.” Bite.

A colleague uses “lame” as a slur while we wait for our iced mochas. “Hey, not cool. I am lame,” I muster. They reply: “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you. I don’t even think of you as disabled.” Bite.

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