The Teshuvah of Unmasking - Salvation of a Disabled Bodymind
Yom Kippur is often misunderstood. Let me set the record straight right now at the very beginning. It isn’t about “repentance”. It gets flattened into a day of guilt, of punishment, of atoning for being human. But that’s not what the day is. Not really.
Teshuvah doesn’t mean repentance in the way most people use the word. It means return. A turning. A coming back - not to perfection, but to presence. To authenticity. Not to some idealized version of ourselves, but to the parts of us we’ve been taught to cut off.
And that hits different for disabled people.
We don’t walk into this day arrogant - at least not in the way people assume. Abled people often assume that we see ourselves as “better than” or “privileged”. An asinine assumption, of course, and one based in ableism. If anything, it’s the arrogance of survival - the kind you build to protect what little dignity you’re allowed to keep. We come into it already having spent our whole lives being told we’re wrong. That we need to try harder. That we need to manage ourselves better. That we’re too sensitive. Too rigid. Too chaotic. Too slow. Too complicated. Too much - and not enough at the same time.
So when the tradition asks us to confess what we’ve done wrong, what happens if what we’ve “done wrong” is just exist in a bodymind the world refuses to accept?
Yom Kippur doesn’t ask us to erase ourselves. It invites us to come back to ourselves. To return to the truth underneath the performance.
And that’s precisely where it starts to hurt.
Because so many of us have had to perform to survive. We’ve had to contort ourselves into versions of “acceptable” just to get through a day. We’ve had to do this in our own communities which are “affirming”. We are asked to do this on Yom Kippur itself! If we don’t go along with what others deem to be “acceptable” on the day, we are shunned.
We’ve learned to hide what we need, to mute what we feel, to translate our truth into something palatable. We’ve learned to say “I’m fine” when we’re not. To smile when we’re in pain. To make eye contact when it floods our nervous systems. We’ve learned to make other people comfortable, even if it kills us a little.
That’s what the world taught us. That safety comes at the cost of authenticity. That survival requires erasure.
