Unit 8Section 1 Exercise 1Cross-Cultural

Acceptance is a deceptive word. It suggests compliance, a consenting to my condition and to who I have become. This form of acceptance is often seen as weakness, submission. We say I accept my punishment. Or I accept your decision. But such assent, while passive in essence, does provide the stable, rocklike foundation for coping with a condition that will not go away. It is a powerful passivity, the Zen of Illness, that allows for endurance. But for all its private essence, acceptance cannot be expressed in purely private terms. My experience did not happen to me alone; family, colleagues and friends, acquaintances were all involved. I had a new relationship with my employer and its insurance company, with federal and state government, with people who read my work. There is a social dimension to the experience of illness and to its acceptance, a kind of reciprocity that goes beyond the enactment of laws governing handicapped access to buildings or rules prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. It is in this social dimension that, for all my private adjustment, I remain a cripple and, apparently, a figure of contempt. From “A measure of acceptance,” Floyd Skloot Creative Nonfiction 10, 2002.

The purpose of this section is to explore the psychological and social expectations that create miscommunications across cultures