Key-Glyph wrote:Siren wrote:I was fortunate enough to be born into an era that has the medical advances strong enough to help me to wrestle with this and win.
I feel similarly all the time. Beautifully worded.
Thanks for sharing your stories, everybody.
Did any of you identify with or admire certain characters or stories because you felt they paralleled your situation? I used to pretend that my migraines were the symptom of my nascent mutant powers, à la the X-Men. I would say to my friends, "Any day now my superpower is going to surface... and it's gonna be
awesome."
Yeah, but at this point I've come to the conclusion that my super-power is simply too awesome to let me have it as it'd be unfair to the rest of you mortals to make me so absolutely uber-pwn. After all, EDS has done a lot to my body, the constant pain, well that's a sign of my latent Wolverine like healing, the dislocations, that's a sign of my elastic body ala Mr. Fantastic, my inability to control my body temperature is an indication of my Iceman powers, the migrains are a sign of my Prof. X psychic abilities and the occational blackouts is my brain ajusting to the possibility of a Nightcrawler esq teleportation that's about to happen...
In all seriousness, I always felt like that though yes. I did relate to the Xmen and similar things because it's a tale about being "different". The alagory is obviously about being gay. Something that can't be seen but makes you different, that you're born with but don't really come to terms with till your teens, that a lot of people hate you for without reason, and that you never asked for. Some cases like Beast and Mystique are examples of racism with the "blue" thing being more obvious, but it's always been about sexuality. The new film makes this so obvious with Hank and his boss when he says "You never told me you where a mutant" and Hank replies "You didn't ask, I didn't tell"... I don't suppose the creators realised how much this alagory fit for the disabled though and it's good that it does, that people can relate to things in different ways to personally get the most out of it. This is why I want them to keep it vague as a referrence. Sure gays need support as there's a lot of hatred still, but there's already loads of stuff out there for gay people to relate to, keeping this up for interpretation makes it much more valuable I think.
One other thing that I found a great connection to was the film Unbreakable. Samuel L. Jacksons character Elijah Prince has Osteogenesis Imperfecta which is a COL1 Classified Collagen Dissorder. There are only 2 Collagen disoders that are classified as COL1 dissorders and those are Osteogenesis Imperfecta, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome... as you can imagine, I relate to this character so much.
