I have no fear.

February 28, 2018, Columbia (Missouri.)

Frank Bruni, the New York Times columnist, may be going blind.
I have been partially deaf since the age of twenty-three.
It has stopped me from applying for jobs, over the years, thinking I could not do good enough work because of my disability, although nobody ever told me so.
What great writing can do. Bruni's column on his disorder, a rare neurological degeneration caused by an "eye stroke," brought me to tears, and after all these years, to the realization that the only disability that prevented me from working at those editing jobs I never applied to was my own fear.
The obstacles and upsets that all people are faced with, as Bruni writes, do not stop them from doing what they do and pursuing their dreams, nor should they. The acknowledgment of our weaknesses only serves to remind us time and again of the beauty of the present moment.
There is no other.
After a year of waking up to the work of activism, the joy and the feeling of liberation of working toward a greater good, thanks to the new political (dis)order of the land that I now call home, after years waking up to myself stronger through the river of a journey of pain and discovery, on January 1st of this year I wrote "I have no fear" in big capital letters on the slate blackboard that hangs in the kitchen. It included a disclaimer: "Other than the big Ds: disease and death."
Thanks to Bruni's column, his description of what some people do living with a handicap much greater than mine, the strength and wonder in who they are and what they do, I can see now that even those fears are like the clouds of this grey winter day in the Midwestern plains, soft and part of the cosmos but without substance of their own.
I have no fear.
Only gratitude, for my disability is also your opportunity to embrace what is best in our humanity.