I Identify as a Hater

Far be it from me to judge any disabled comrade on how to interpret their disabled reality, especially one that chooses to find joy and strength in it. But I just can’t get into Lachi’s I Identify as Blind. Honestly, I feel bad about it! Lachi is objectively iconic and spearheads a powerful division of the disabled recording artist scene. She makes videos of her performing her music on the streets of New York City, demanding the space her cane needs, parting seas of pre-disabled commuters embarrassed at being embarrassed; she’s gorgeously open about sexuality and insists on her own sexual appeal; she wrote a book! I mean, shit, writing a book is just cool (unless you’re someone like Jordan Peterson or some other societal leech). It’s just not a book for me.

Many aspects of Lachi’s writing even match my own—a tendency towards maximalist writing, heaps of parenthetical humour, weird sexual interludes that I think I still do (but can’t totally be sure now that I’m writing it down). I should enjoy it given that I enjoy my own writing. If I can be so bold to say though there is a lack of restraint. Lachi has this tendency to go full-throttle, as a room mate of mine used to say, and I get swept up in the speed of it in such a way that I can’t savour the words, the language, the struggle behind it all. I think my breaking point was when I read “rizz” used, seemingly, unironically. Is this a sign that I’m just old? That I have some French blood that is crying for a purifying of language? Or, as I suspect, was rizz just another rock on the stack of Giles and I hadn’t the breath to beg more.

I would, however, recommend I Identify as Blind to heaps of folks. Unfamiliar with the primary tenets of the modern disability movement? Read the book. A young, newly disabled feller? Read the book. Horny? Read the book. We need the energy that Lachi brings, I will never be caught crying for the elimination of it.

Because I do construct something of a bubble with my own rage, both around myself and those trying to learn from me. My rage is something that comes naturally after the despair of an initial discovery of disability; it’s almost easy. The first time a bus leaves you behind and makes you late for a job you hate because you can’t see well enough to not drop drinks on folks. The only joy there belongs to the jeers from the pre-disableds on the bus and the cheers from the sticky and wet. You can laugh at yourself, but you’ll scream at home. Lachi paves an avenue for joy to drive on even if it’s a cobbled brick road massaging your ass past relief into pain.

The bulk of my rage is not something I want to pass on, it should die with me. We’ll always need a splash of it, an ability to shout at the folks that consider us unworthy of our existence. We need folks willing to rail politicians and businesses and gross ass conservatives, but that rage is focused and well under control. It’s on a switch, clicks on and off and on at our need. The rage that my blindness has further blinded me with hasn’t a switch nor a dimmer. It’s either on or I’m decomposed. I’d rather know of a future where Lachi’s philosophy outnumbers my own, as it means that I, and all those like me, have struck down the historic institutions that keep us flared.

I don’t like writing critique about work produced by someone who is just writing to a different audience. Regardless of the foundation of my own arguments it’ll always be hollow. My only issue is truly that I am not who the book is meant for. When I’m teaching I’m constantly trying to remind students that their writing is not for everyone and they need to understand that. That sometimes we don’t like something just because it is not for us, but the folks it is for are given intense wealth from experiencing the art. I pump so much applause for Lachi because I want to make it clear that she is not a bad artist nor does she produce bad art, even if it is not for me. I want folks to read and listen to her work!

I want to normalise the practice of recognising when something isn’t for us. Students, frequently confronted with boring ass essays I force them to read, need to learn how to suck it up and read it anyway, come away with some form of understanding. I have precious little energy to spend on engaging with art, so I did not finish the book, but gave it my customary fifty to one hundred pages. I have to move on or my time for pleasure reading will be spent in physical pain, such is the life of being disabled. Regardless of the struggle in my heart, where I feel that I am somehow betraying a comrade I have never met, to meet my goal of showing folks we can just not be intended for something, I have to form out these troublesome thoughts for the world (potentially Lachi) to see.

I also harbour tinges of envy. Most disabled folks who find success and happiness become objects of my envy as I struggle to find either in my own life. Legitimate complaints against many folks I do have, but even with a portfolio of verifiable sins stacked against them, they can read through it and find my own green bastard lurking around in there. Where is my joy? Why can’t I choose it? Where is my success? My Apple commercial about the accessibility tools of an iPhone? Have I not suffered enough or posted enough or been disabled enough? Or am I too ugly or not ugly enough or not the right kind of disabled? Is it that rage I have. Boiling, churning, emanating from skin hardly concealing it.

I Identify as Blind doesn’t say, nor should it, nor does it want to. It does tell a story about one person living a joyous disabled life while introducing the potentially uninitiated into an interpretation of disabled culture that I struggle to communicate. It’s fun, it’s sexy, it’s iconic. It’s not for me.