Climbing the Path of Self-Acceptance: An Autobiographical Narrative

EDITORIAL, 23 Jun 2025

#904 | Richard Falk – TRANSCEND Media Service

A Healing Context

Introductory Note:

I submitted this editorial to TMS on the psychic healing process of physical injury because it seemed so congruent with healing in public spheres of peacebuilding and conflict resolution and transcendence. These latter concerns were brilliantly articulated by Johan Galtung throughout his long life experience as founder and chief missionary of peace studies, which include his innovative advocacy and practice of solutions-oriented peace journalism. What is mutually reinforcing about these two domains of healing is to their shared dedication to creating the best possible version of a livable future. I find it intriguing that the implicit wisdom of Grace Spence Green’s amazing book her ‘recovery’ from a crippling spinal cord injury that failed to overcome the paralysis and yet made her post-injury life so satisfying that it made her life better than before the injury. This refusal to dwell on what is past, but to build a new future is consonant in my imagination with Johan’s strikingly original turn of mind and Antonio C.S. Rosa’s ever so faithful rendering of Johan’s legacy to all of us yearning for a more just and livable world. [i]

The Story Unfolds

There are many reasons to celebrate the publication of To Exist as I Am.[ii] None is more compelling that its deep insight into the meaning of a life well-lived. This must-read book treats the transforming experience of enduring a paralyzing spinal cord injury in her early 20s into a daily struggle of the victim that culminates, after enduring much grief, in a transcending life-enhancing experience.

In its essence, the miracle depicted vividly and convincingly by this author is not in the form of discovering an unexpected cure that would return her life to what it was before the injury. She writes of her post-injury experience in a manner I would have never thought possible: “I wouldn’t take a cure now if there was one. My identity now—the community I have, the friends I have made, the learning I have had to do, the rich complexity of my existence, the way my injury forces me into situations I would never been involved with—that is all too valuable to reverse.” (184) Grace Spence Green summarizes the transformative core of the before/after transition in a single arresting sentence: “I have been forced to become someone I love.” (189)

Grace let’s readers know that she had fourth advantages over many victims of severe disabilities. The first and undoubtedly the foremost, was the deep confidence instilled in her being by the unconditional love of her parents and her then boyfriend, and now fiancé, Nathan. She is not only sustained by their love and dedication, but it helps her understand that no matter how severe the bodily injury, it is the inner life of heart and spirit that bring joy, remains invulnerable so long as human consciousness is unimpaired. This inner/outer duality of life needs to be understood as a complement to the before/after temporal duality. Put differently, life remains precious however much bodily injury makes manageable, if sometime agonizing, the daily challenges of finding bathrooms suitable for persons with this kind of disability or elevators large enough to accommodate a wheelchair or ramps that allow entry into buildings without climbing steps or once within climbing stairs or a seemingly endless adjustments to a society not designed to respond to the needs of wheelchair disabled persons.

The second advantage was the exceptional receptivity to giving and receiving care that she possessed as compared to most people, including those similarly disabled. From an early age Grace was clear while still a chilld that she wanted to be a medical doctor, and nothing else. She reports being drawn to this vocation because it involved caring for others, alleviating their pain, restoring their health. I never had such a longing, and certainly not as a child, when I drifted toward an uncertain future without any sense of vocational direction. And from my contact through the years with friends and their children I contrast my slow pace of self-discovery, which seems more closer to the social norm, than does Grace’s precocious vocational resolve. Of course, it serves her well when tested by this life-changing injuries. Whereas many of us would have chosen something more private and sedentary after such an injury, she felt more than ever committed to a life of caring, which is further evidence that her inner being emerged healthier than ever after the adjustment ordeals of the early months after the injury.

A third advantage, fully commented upon by the author, is the range of class advantages that include quality education and the financial ability to make the expensive physical adjustments to compensate for the loss of mobility when confined to a wheelchair. Important also is the sophisticated knowledge of what practical adjustments are best suited to the particularities of her life in London.

A fourth advantage is to have a reflective sensibility that is coupled with the self-confidence, honesty, knowledge, and insider experience to articulate the humiliations and limitations of her condition that are unavoidably an ingrained part of life after such an injury.

Post-Injury Evolution: Being and Becoming

A fascinating aspect of the way Grace interprets her post-injury life, as a process in flux, as a before/after dualism, and as a being/becoming dualism. This latter feature of her experience is shaped by the dynamic interplay between the relative fixity of love and care-giving and care-receiving on the one side and the fluidity of an evolving self that benefits from new friendships, learning experiences, and enclaves of bonding. The most dramatic phase of becoming is the earlier wish to be independent as possible to the latter experiences of more satisfying interdependence, which is most significant in Grace’s sense of community with other disabled persons, sharing information and experience, and feeling apart from all others in these spheres of her new life. Closely related to this kind of disabled support is the kinship with disabled patients and co-workers, the sense of mutuality that emerges from helping and being helped.

One of the shared aspects of being disabled is the societal disregard of special needs in the design of facilities in public space, and the realization that improvements from the perspective of disabled communities will only arise from sustained collective efforts as with wheelchair, bathroom, and parking accommodations in public spaces and structures. In my lifetime, despite the persistence of many inadequacies, the situation facing seriously disabled people has improved dramatically, and although empathetic consciousness remains underdeveloped it too has evolved, at least in the more developed countries. But this sense of community goes beyond the tangible to helping disabled persons recover their sense of self-worth not by acting alone but through acting with others. In a sense, acting together liberates the self from capitalist captivity, which has become highly individualized for middle classes and above. This individualism is as pervasive as the air we breathe, and take for granted, that we rarely pause our rhythms of work and play long enough to become aware that this rapacious atmosphere robs us of the satisfactions of community.

An Intriguing Choice

The most logical ordering of this moving and informative story of ‘a transcendent recovery’ from a permanent disability caused by the irresponsible wrongdoing of a stranger would have been a chronologically arranged narrative that began with accident. Yet upon reflection, placing at the end as the author has done is a choice at once formally puzzling yet in keeping with the way wants her story understood. The book is not about her bad luck or the saga of the failed life of another person underscored by his failed suicide, resulting criminal accountability for causing a total stranger the suffering of such a permanent disability. Above all, the book is about the more remarkable aspect of the incident, which is told in a manner that makes it credible. It about the miracle of a transcendent recovery that is not physical but psychological and spiritual, a path leading to such an amazing enactment of of self-acceptance that is expressed by her refusal to wish for a cure or a reversal of her evolved self into her happy life before October 17, 2018 the day of the event that separated life into a before of remembering and an after of becoming and doing. This is the story so worth telling and so beautifully told.

Waiting until the epilogue Graces there makes clear that this miracle of self-acceptance was an achievement of mutuality through the solidarity and community of others, as well as the class privileges that facilitated an optimal adjustment to the disability in the ‘after’ phases. Her heroes were clear demarcated. Parents and boyfriend (to be husband within a month) to whom the book is dedicated, followed ever so closely by those with whom she shared the challenges and satisfactions of disability, whether patients or medical colleagues. And not far behind are friends that did not turn away or shower her with the demeaning emotion of ‘pity.’

My two final takeaways from this story so well told, were learning experiences for me. The first is that grief while real and in some senses permanent, need not remain dominant in the ‘after’ phases to preclude happiness and the joys of life. But there is a proviso. Grief will only be subordinated if overshadowed by self-acceptance. And self-acceptance can only take root if one keeps looking forward to what is fulfilling in the ‘after’ phases. Once it does take root it become natural to remember the joys of ‘before’ phases with sense of healthy nostalgia rather than a craving what has become unattainable due to living with the disability.

And finally, Grace wants to understand that for her the occasion that resulted in the disability was random rather than fated to happen. In effect, part of the vulnerability and contingency of life is our susceptibility to random events. This is an organic acceptance of life as it is without indulging comforting illusions that whatever happens was meant to occur as part of a larger design, whether religiously grounded or not. Randomness not fate is the living tissue of life whose acceptance encourages looking forward and not sitting back bemoaning one’s victimization. Of course, this acceptance is not meant to deny the importance of prudence as the taming of harmful randomness by safe driving and benign loving. Randomness brought Grace a formidable life challenge that required special gifts of character and understanding to surmount, but it also brought her beloved Nathan into her life.

Personally, this book was more than inspirational, which it was, but a valuable learning experienced at an advanced age as to the unmet challenges of disability to the conscience of society and its citizens at every emotional level of ethical being and becoming.

Among Many Vital Messages I Choose for Myself This One:

“How fragile it all is and how precious.”  

NOTES:

[i] I refer to the author throughout as ‘Grace’ because we are friends, not as an unconscious exhibition of sexism toward female authors. My wife and I have been family friends for more than a decade, and it would have felt unnatural to be formal and refer to the author as Grace Spence Green.

[ii] Grace Spence Green, To Exist as I Am: A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance, Welcome Collection, London, 2025

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Jun 2025.

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