The thing about being born without one hand and one foot is that you think it's easy to tell where The Problem is - you just count how many fingers you have, or you pause to consider the fact that you've strapped on a prosthetic limb every day since you could walk.
You look around and count how many fingers all your friends have, and how many of them wear prosthetic limbs.
And The Problem begins to take shape.
This sort of counting exercise begins young, of course, and is helped along quickly by the stares and questions of the other kids.
A seed is planted, and from it grows the first rudimentary answer to the question, Who am I? A link is forged between personal identity and those missing fingers and prosthetic limb.
By the time adulthood is reached the seed has grown into a tangled and very dark vine that stretches across your being and blots out both reason and reality.
You know what The Problem is.
You have half the requisite number of fingers and toes.
You are fifty percent of a human being.
Fifty percent.
A failing grade.
Now the counting exercise becomes a game of hide-and-seek.
You must hide The Problem and put on a brave mask in order to survive amongst those more fortunate than you.
And even as you succeed at this, you come to resent them for their normalcy and how they take it for granted.
Each day as you strap on the prosthesis you are reminded of The Problem that will forever separate you from the rest of the world.
If only you could be like everyone else.
The vine grows stronger.
The world gets darker.
The Problem is your special secret, to be protected at all costs.
I lived that life and thought those thoughts for better than three decades.
And when I had had enough and started to address The Problem, I made an unexpected (and unwelcome) discovery: that for all that time I had been wrong about what The Problem was.
The Problem was not at the end of my arm or embodied in a prosthetic limb.
It was in my head.
I had been muddling through my life convinced I was a second-class human being.
Wasn't that the way everyone saw me? Didn't they treat me differently? The answer, as I saw when I really looked, was no.
No one saw me as "handicapped.
" No one treated me differently.
Except me.
What a breathtaking moment this was.
To see that the core "truth" I'd built my identity around was nothing more than a collection of bad ideas I'd come up with in elementary school.
For the first time, I was able to see that vine, and I knew that I was going to have to tear it out at the roots if I was going to get any better.
It was when I started the recovery process that I recognized the deeper, darker secret that had long existed underneath The Problem itself: that, at a certain level, I liked being handicapped, different, second-class.
Having The Problem up my sleeve (so to speak), I had a very convenient and very effective excuse for not living up to my responsibilities.
When pressed, I could turn into a sympathy-generating machine, and in all those years no one ever called me out.
In short, being the "victim" of a handicap was a very useful thing for me.
This made it hard to give up The Problem, because once I gave it up I could no longer be a victim - I could only be judged by my actions.
This scared the hell out of me, because I didn't think I could measure up.
Thankfully, that turned out to be another one of my bad ideas.
The specific path I took to recovery isn't important.
What is important, however, is that I had to become willing to go to any length to get over this "inside" part of my handicap.
That dark vine and the ideas associated with it did not give way easily, and many times I was discouraged and thought about giving up.
But I had gotten to the point where I just couldn't stomach The Problem anymore.
So I had to keep going.
After awhile, I started talking with people about all this - telling them about The Problem and how wrong I had been about it.
And the most amazing thing happened: almost everyone described some thing about themselves that they considered a "handicap": a glass eye, lack of education, even being gay.
None of these things was a handicap, of course, but the struggles and emotions these people felt were exactly the same as mine.
I had dreamed of being just like everyone else, when in fact everyone else was just like me.
And thus did The Problem cease to exist.