Opinion | The Dignity of Disabled Lives

Independence is not so brave a value as we often insist, and it is also almost impossible; we live in a collective fabric, all our lives entwined with the lives of others. Human beings are social animals. Disabled people are often dependent on other people, and in our lionization of self-sufficiency, we see that as a weakness. But dependency has its own particular poetry. It is a fundamental aspect of intimacy, a defining quality of love.

When I first came across inclusion and mainstreaming as educational strategies, I thought they must be lovely for the disabled people whose position was advanced. But I thought it might be tough on the nondisabled people, whose progress would inevitably be slowed down by the accommodations that their disabled classmates required. Now, having been in many such classrooms, I can say that the primary advantage redounds to the nondisabled children, who grow up less afraid of difference than they would otherwise be, more receptive to the intense humanity of their fellow students. They do not think that independence is success and dependence is failure. This can allow them more willing to acknowledge their own dependence, to tolerate their own vulnerability.

Until Jason Kingsley, who has Down syndrome, began appearing on “Sesame Street” in the 1970s, there had been almost no disabled children publicly visible since the Victorian era, when the disabled were often sentimentalized and gathered at the family hearth. In the 20th century, people whose children were disabled tended to hide them, seldom taking them into the market squares or shopping malls or restaurants or theaters where human beings come into contact with strangers. They were squirreled away at home or ferried to institutions, an exhausting embarrassment.

Now, disabled people are more visible than ever. We live in a time of great social progress, when that visibility has been achieved — but we also live in a time of great medical progress, and at the same time that many forms of disability are being acknowledged as identities, they are becoming subject to cure. I believe in social progress and I believe in medical progress, but it would be tremendous for them to be more awake to each other. Disability may coexist with shocking ability; indeed, the shocking ability may rise in part from the depth of consciousness required of people who are disabled and who have to figure out an often bewildering world through their particular consciousness. To imagine, and I use the most obvious example, Stephen Hawking without disability is to imagine someone else entirely.

I come to this movement for rights through my struggle with depression, a mental illness that can earn you disability stripes. Depression’s up side is substantial; I’ve learned a lot from my depression. If I had my life to do over, however, I’d wish it away. I pray that it never afflicts my children. I also belong, as we all do, to myriad other minorities. If I imagine myself without dyslexia, without A.D.D., without depression, without gayness, without nearsightedness, without orthostatic hypotension, without Jewishness, without white privilege, without prosopagnosia, then there’s very little of me left. We are mostly an accumulation of strengths and weaknesses, of pathologized and nonpathologized conditions and identities.

My grandmother used to say, “Everybody’s got something.” Our work is to seek for meaning in who we are rather than in who we might have wished to be. It may be easier in the United States as it’s currently constructed to be white than it is to be of color, but most people of color do not spend their time wishing they had pale skin and golden hair. Women may know that men have more privilege, but women don’t in general experience that difference as one they would address by switching gender. We are our authentic selves, striving for justice, and the rest is commentary.

Andrew Solomon (@Andrew_Solomon) is a professor of medical clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, and the author of “Far From the Tree,” which has been made into a documentary film, and of “The Noonday Demon” and “Far and Away.”

This essay is adapted from the author’s foreword to the new book “About Us: Essays From The New York Times Disability Series,” edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.

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