Living Without Egos

“Living With Quiggles” has covered a wide range of stigma issues such as the impact of staring; how language stigmatizes; the decision to attempt to “pass” in society by keeping a health challenge or disability hidden; the reactions when the birth of a baby brings an unexpected Quiggle into a family; and many other subtle issues of stigma in healthcare.

For the most part we’ve explored stigmatization as it applies to strangers who connect briefly as they stumble upon one another while going about their daily lives. But how does one handle stigma when the dynamics become more personal and the relationships closer? How do our egos interfere?Continue reading→

Bitter or Better?

Bob Love was an NBA basketball player who lives with a Quiggle.

Most of us vividly remember our very first jobs even though they weren’t likely to have been in the proverbial mail room. My first was walking beans, unless of course you count the Christmas when I was five and started wrapping Christmas purchases sold in my father’s small town men’s clothing store. The pay at the time was a daily trip to see Santa in his special little house which was set up each Christmastime on the lawn of the court house. Since no dollars changed hands, I think that walking beans really qualifies as my first job.

For you city folk, walking beans means being up long before the sun, rushing to a designated pick-up spot in town, riding in the back of an old pick-up farm truck to the fields where you will then spend 14 hour days walking acres and acres of rows of beans, cultivating the soil, and removing the invading corn plants. “Blazing sun” and “dog days of August” took on an entirely new meaning within a day of starting my first job. The compensation was bragging rights at school in the fall that you hadn’t whimped out and, if memory serves, $.50 an hour.

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Learning to Dance in the Rain

Adjusting to a stigmatizing health condition happens, in all likelihood, in a series of phases perhaps not unlike those described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross when she put forth her ideas about the process of death and dying. Goffman in his study of stigma suggests that there indeed is such a process: “the stigmatized individual can come to feel that he should be above passing, that if he accepts himself and respects himself he will feel no need to conceal his failing”. However, Goffman then goes on to write that many people (who may even be priding themselves on having made the adjustment to their stigmatizing condition) aren’t even aware that they may be doing something called covering.

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Turning Cartwheels

Doing cartwheels!

One of the best docs in my world, both as a friend and as a partner (we are co-founders of Label Me Not – a movement to defeat stigma in healthcare) hit a milestone birthday this summer. He was definitely not pleased about this marker and, as he explained to me, he was feeling the self-stigmatization of old age. Now mind you (as the Brits would say) this is a guy who attended prestigious medical schools; is internationally known for his work as a medical futurist who is helping to chart the future healthcare needs of individuals with developmental disabilities; and an unlikely candidate to be feeling the stigma of aging. He is someone you’d think was just too busy to allow a birthday to throw him off track.Continue reading→

When Stigma Kills

You wake up one morning and suddenly you find yourself questioning why you have been working so hard fighting for a cause, when maybe you’ve just really been tilting at windmills. You’re tired, burnt out, feeling you haven’t even begun to make a difference, and you can’t help but think of the lost income if you’d followed another career path; the time not spent with family or vacations foregone – you also see the sands of time slipping away – and suddenly you go nuts. Some might call it just the usual midlife crisis – but for those who have passionately fought for a cause I think it’s different – something a small red sports car just won’t fix.Continue reading→

Who Is Going to Do It?

Over a lifetime we all construct a belief system, a compilation of our life’s past experiences, education (or lack thereof), parental attitudes, religious upbringing, who we choose for a life partner, and the quality of our friendships, to name just a few influences. Our individual belief systems are as unique as each of us. Each day’s new experiences are filtered through these beliefs. Individual belief systems lead some to accept strange objects in the night sky as an indication of visitors from across galaxies; others to attribute happenings in their lives as coincidence while many may see these “coincidences” as guidance coming from a source beyond their human ability to see or hear. Our belief systems also influence how we deal with stigma, for instance will we stigmatize others; or how much we might internalize stigma if it is directed at us personally.

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