I was sitting across the kitchen table from my partner. We were discussing cancelling plans to see friends and family, and a longed-for holiday we’d booked. The global pandemic had taken everyone by surprise and the prime minister had just told the country to stay at home.
On the table between us was the wedding present my brother-in-law had given us. Sometimes we filled it with fruit, but it was empty now. I’d always liked it. Almost half the bowl was unmarked white porcelain, and the rest was criss-crossed with golden-lined cracks, converging to a close-knit epicentre of crazed triangles. He’d bought the bowl, smashed it with a hammer and painstakingly put it back together using kintsukuroi, then packed it in its box.
Kintsukuroi, or Golden Repair, is a Japanese technique that uses lacquer mixed with gold to repair pottery. I’d looked it up and searched out old examples in London museums. A vessel is not thrown away when it breaks. The break becomes part of the history of the object, and the beauty and the time spent on the repair add to the reason the object is valued. The flaws and imperfections are embraced, turned golden by the liquid lines. In an age of throw-away consumerism, the bowl stands out in our house – it’s more beautiful and interesting to me than the original ever would have been.
Later that week I lay in bed awake. Anxiety consumed me in the darkness. The busy road at the end of our street, normally a constant whooshing, was silent now and my thoughts had turned apocalyptic. I had little fear of the virus. I could see in the science that I would be unlucky to suffer serious illness. But my morning appointment at the limb-fitting centre had been cancelled and I was catastrophising: what if the economy collapses, what if I lose my job, what if the NHS fails? My imagination was spiralling: what if the power stops, how will I charge my prosthetic leg? What happens if it breaks or I get an infection now? What if the companies that supply my med-tech go bust? How will I find food for my family? How many tins of tomatoes do we have downstairs?
Everyone’s lives were suddenly made precarious, and disabled communities would feel this keenly. I noticed the very small ways in which the pandemic affected my disability: wearing a face mask obscured where my prosthetics were stepping and I found I tripped more (and a friend told me her mask kept dislodging her hearing aid); I noticed the people I met for the first time on video calls treated me differently, not seeing my disability. (We all discovered video-conference calling, but I thought of the disabled groups, too vulnerable to meet in person, who had connected this way for years – leading the way with tech, again.) But the impact on the disabled would be far greater: isolated from their social networks and healthcare support, they would make up six of every ten people who died from the disease in the UK.
A siren warbled past and I sighed and turned over. The pandemic had ended my search for those who pushed at the boundaries of what it means to fuse the body with technology. Meetings and symposiums were cancelled and I hunkered down with my family. After talking with so many hybrids, I felt more comfortable with my disability. Even disabled felt okay – still not quite right, but language is imperfect. And I’d learnt that people had fought for that word, and the rights that came with it. I still liked hybrid human as a way to describe my experience, but the technologies I’d discovered remained far from being anything other than assistive – I was disabled, and always would be. Accepting this was a relief: being thankful for what I had, rather than striving for some unrealistic expectation of what might be possible, had made me happier.
The pandemic knocked some of this optimism. It made me aware of how dependent I was. The technologies that repaired me were so connected to the companies, healthcare providers and government institutions of a functioning society, and in the middle of the night it felt as if those foundations were shaking. It reminded me that I would remain dependent on the society I knew I was very lucky to be a member of. When I heard people say we had to let the virus run its course, that we were protecting the old while the young suffered, it made me wonder who gets left behind when the boat starts to sink. A society that doesn’t look after the vulnerable isn’t looking after anyone – I’d learnt first-hand that we’re all just a moment from becoming vulnerable.
When I acquired a disability, I hadn’t been chucked on the rubbish tip. Like the kintsukuroi bowl, I had been remade. This process of repair, and the time I’d spent on it, added to the reason I valued my life more. I had embraced my flaws and imperfections, those golden lines of my repair that were interwoven with the medical technologies I relied on. This was why I’d found myself feeling a little hero-worship for the therapists and doctors, the engineers and scientists I’d met along the way – they were the ones who had repaired me. I felt hopeful that science would give us a collective way out of the pandemic. Vaccines and therapies would be developed. I knew, just like so many of the technologies I’d seen over the last year, they wouldn’t live up to the hype – there would be no silver bullet, and we would be turning the dial towards freedom and out of the trauma, but perhaps we would find a little collective Golden Repair in the process.
The light of morning shifted my anxiety and after breakfast I sat on the floor, staring through the wall as my children played around me. My partner was working upstairs. We would swap at lunch. I looked over at my son. He was wrestling with a cardboard delivery box by the front door. He put it over his head, walked into the wall, wobbled and then I heard his muffled voice, ‘I am robot.’
I pulled the box off him, cut holes for his face and arms with the bread knife, squashed him back in and he walked round and round the kitchen table, grinning from the opening, arms sticking from each side and repeating, ‘I am robot.’ And my daughter laughed and goaded him and threw cuddly toys at him.