Never Walked In High Heels

“Do you realize that this will now be the 11^th time I have moved in 3 years?” I was exasperated while talking to my mother. “There is nothing about me that actually wants to make this move at all, and I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why, but I just can’t. The truth is, it’s a beautiful new flat in a wonderful area of town. It’s cheaper than where I’m living now. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be excited about it Mom, except I’m not. Everything about me hates the prospect of moving again.”

My mother sighed. She’s used to my overly dramatic ways. I like to believe that I don’t need her anymore. That I can pay my own bills and make my way in the world, but when things are messy, I still need to call home, and she, oddly enough, is the only one who can make sense out of anything for me.

“Why do you think that is?” Well hell if I knew. That was my entire point of calling her in the first place. The thing is, I don’t call my mother unless I’m absolutely positively stuck and cannot sort through anything in my life. This is an occurrence that happens at least once every two weeks…sometimes daily.

“Well I know that when it comes to at least 3 of those 11 moves, they were moves that you didn’t particularly want to make. Like in college when the school told you that they weren’t going to give you any form of housing because they didn’t feel the need to provide it for their students with disabilities, or last year when you were up in Scotland. You moved up there so that you could go to school, and less than a year later you were leaving because that school failed you. And now, with this situation…” Her voice trailed off. With this situation, it was terrible. The train station that I was currently living at advertised itself to be wheelchair accessible, but the fact was that they were completely unprepared for anyone with a disability. The workers were all in terrible moods and often completely ignored me. The main station in London would put me on a train and then forget to tell my local station to take me off. Most recently, I had discovered that they were completely unprepared in the event of a fire to provide me with any emergency assistance out of the station. If there were a real fire, it would be my own life, in my own hands, walking on my own unstable legs.

When we were kids, it seemed that more often than not, friends moved away who didn’t particularly want to leave our class. They moved of course because they were the children of parents who got better jobs, or had to downsize; they moved to Las Vegas or Idaho; they moved because of happy times, or in an attempt to escape bad conditions. Our teachers always told us that moving was hard, but good. Eventually you make new friends and the new place becomes home. I hadn’t felt like I had a home for the past two years, and after moving 11 times, I was getting very sick of living in boxes.

People move for reasons far beyond the ones that we saw when we were kids. Immigrants move, sometimes with the hope of a better life, or sometimes to escape persecution. People flee their homes and go into hiding; there are all sorts of complicated reasons that, while narrowly focused on our own lives, we don’t even consider when we see a moving truck in the driveway. The abusive relationship, the mortgage that is unable to be paid, the child who has now hit 23 and is trying to spread her own wings—even though it seems to her parents that she is running away. The act of moving is in and of itself complicated, the reasons behind it are infinitely more so.

My family lived in the same home from the time that I was 3 until I was 10, and then the same house from when I was 10 to 21. Then suddenly, my father got a phone call one day from a headhunter. It had been a particularly bad week for him, and he told my mother the night before that if he suddenly had the opportunity to move and get away from where he was working, he’d take it. The next day the phone rang and within one month he was living in Vegas waiting for us to follow him. That was a happy move. All of those were happy moves.

The move I was facing now felt complicated and frustrating. I had been expecting to live in the same flat for at least five more years after moving in. Nine months later, I realized that the station wasn’t going to improve. I couldn’t stand to be harassed any longer by station staff, and I started calling around to nearby restaurants asking if they had any empty boxes and Styrofoam peanuts.

It all made sense. Life may be an adventure and take you to areas you never dreamed of, but those travels should always be because you wanted them to happen. Not because you were forced into exile by someone else’s idiocy. Unfortunately it sometimes doesn’t work that way, and you’re left wondering what to take, what to leave behind, and what might get lost along the way.

The forced moves may be more aptly named “replacements” or even “misplacements” as the term “moving” seems to give the act a false sense of joy and accomplishment. You “move on” from one phase of life to the next, but you become “replaced” due to lack of action. It’s nothing new. Entire clans went from one location to the next, migrating when hostilities become too much to bear It’s never just, but these movements do turn the pages of history. When this happens we lose something, gain something else. There’s always that one box which disappears and that one item which now needs to be a different size, shape, color. Perhaps we misplace something too. Thinking that this place is “it,” the new home that will suit us for years to come, the neighborhood will welcome our life with open arms, and that we won’t have to move again, we place our hope in a home to be finite, rather realizing that “home” while important, isn’t all there is to life. After all, if it was, we would never move.

“Hi. Why are you still in the UK? I hate London. I hated it when I was there three years ago. Nobody is friendly…I don’t get what you’re doing spending your time over there.”

This was how he opened his phone call to me. The next hour was a barrage of attacks about how not everyone got what they wanted out of life and it was time for me to come home. Every time I pointed out that I owned my own company or that I was paying my rent just fine, it didn’t seem to matter. Then came the killer statement, “What you need to do is move to New York City and write about being disabled for disabled people.” It was a suggestion that was completely impractical. I’ve never been to New York and I don’t know anyone in the entire state. The suggestion was insidious as it prayed on my faults and immature desires to quit and go home after a difficult year. But when you know it’s the wrong thing to do, and the last thing you need to hear is that you should quit and go back home. It was insulting because after 10 years of knowing me, all he thought I was capable of doing was writing at my desk to a 100% disabled audience.

If the phone call had been from a family member, I would have been able to handle it better. But this was one of my best friends—someone who had taught me since I was 15. I sat in the back of his classroom with my hand raised for three years asking questions and learning about the world as he saw it. A high school teacher’s job is to prepare his students to face the frightening prospects of an infinite universe, and to equip those students with the tools they need to succeed beyond there wildest dreams. This was the man who taught me that my mind and my capacity for thought and innovation was unlimited and a great gift to be embraced. He was even a man who went to bat for me against the high school administration, insisting that I would not be put in a special education classroom and swearing up and down that doing so would be a “grave injustice to her mind.”

And here he was now, not recommending or even insisting, but it felt like demanding, that I quit and move back to the States in order to go the safe route. “Most people want A, B, and C out of life but they don’t get A, B, and C. They have to settle for E, D, F. You’re job is to figure out what kind of E, D, and F you have to offer the world.” Is this the same person that I read Catcher and the Rye with? The same man who told me stories about going to Morocco and encouraged me to do likewise after college graduation? He had been one of my support structures and was now feeding me platitudes about life that I wouldn’t have even thought him to believe.

I finally hung up on him after and hour. I couldn’t take anymore. He continued despite my insistence that I was paying my rent, I was learning from the real world, and there were things in London I couldn’t leave. “Like what?” he questioned indignantly. Like the company, my company and the friends I’ve found over the past three years, all of the professional connections I had built up, my home, my church, my life. Even though the going was tough, I couldn’t just get up and walk away from it.

After a few days of cooling off, I realized that one of two things had happened. Not seeing him for three years meant that I no longer knew him, and he no longer knew me. Either way there was a rift, and given his response to my pleads and insistences that he see the truth, I wasn’t sure I wanted to fix it. His mid 20s may have been the time that he decided to leave Morocco to come back home and teach, but I wasn’t ready to do anything of the sort even as noble as teaching was. I still feel deeply called to take on the challenges of the unfamiliar and boundless world he taught me about. Not going to familiar territory to receive the consistent paycheck and live the easy life. When I was younger, he challenged me to do exactly what I am doing. His current insistence of dropping what I am doing just because it is difficult doesn’t fit with the worldview that he helped to give me. And so, although I’m not sure who it was I talked to over the phone, I refuse to go home and lead the comfortable life. If that means I am a disappointment, or so beyond what a mentor thought I was capable of then so be it. Part of growing up is realizing that nobody has all the answers, and that we’re all really trying to get by on a ninth grader’s wet shoestring. The second we realize that about ourselves, our parents, our mentors, and everyone else we meet, the horizons open up and you see the freedom to make yourself and this world what you want it to be—something you never knew you had.

“Dear Athena, thank you so much for the invitation to see you perform at Sadler’s Wells next month. Unfortunately, due to the current conditions of the economy, I feel that I cannot take on any additional clients as it would not be fair to the clients I am currently serving. Thank you again for your invitation. Regards”

Okay. I get it. The economy is bad, really bad actually. The UK and the rest of the world are slowly grinding to a standstill. People are being laid off. The housing market, which dictates so many other seemingly unrelated things, now seems to be everywhere—shooting up one minute and failing the next. It’s rough and nobody likes it. But now it seems that on top of all the other problems, people are actually starting to use the economy as an excuse for everything.

And when I say everything, I mean everything—completely unrelated items such as kicking the dog when you get home, or not considering clients for a potential acting agency. You and your wife got in a fight? Blame the economy. Late for work three days in a row? Well, it’s because the economy is ruining public transportation. Kids not doing well in school? It’s because the economy is so bad that nobody can focus anymore. All these problems are very real and money does affect everything, even corners of our lives that we can’t imagine. But there comes a point in time, where people can only blame their issues on their own choices and not on external problems.

I can appreciate that being an acting agent in London is hard, very hard. So hard in fact, that in the best of times an agent might not come to your show. She’s not interested, or busy, or she has a full roster already. All perfectly acceptable reasons for not coming out to a production. To hide behind conditions when they have nothing to do with the present situation is to ultimately change excuses to consistently avoid the truth. Just say you are unable to make it to the show, or you can’t take any more clients. That reason is actually as acceptable now as it was three years ago.

And the fact is this entire letter is reflective of how we got into the economic mess in the first place. People blaming other people rather than taking action will always lead to disaster be it war, economic downfall, or social upheaval. And then to say that something wouldn’t be, “fair to other clients,” is absurd. Nothing is fair, I get that, and within a certain acting agent’s roster, clients are competing against each other for the same job. Is that fair? But there is a world of difference between a job being inherently competitive (and therefore refined by competitive people) and one that is ground to a halt by a bad economy.

If a man didn’t make the cut for his NCAA college basketball team, would that be blamed on the bad economy as well?

In college when we would go the health center, everything was blamed on a virus. You could go with a broken leg and the nurse would tell you that the broken leg virus has been going around all season. Now it seems we have the bad economy virus. Yes, it is extremely easy to lose both hope and momentum when in a recession, but that is the last thing any of us should want to do. Closing our hands, clenching our fists, and hiding under the bed in fear of what my happen will only serve to make a bad situation infinitely worse. If everyone responded this way how could we ever hope to bring about the level of optimism and opportunity needed to make things better. You’re scared. I’m scared. We’re all terrified as to what may happen, but the truth is that the doors that seem to be closing because of the economic downturn were always difficult to open in the first place. Storms are always hard to weather and challenges come and go. The difference is that Fox News and CNN don’t usually focus on it when you’re terrified. Keep your hands out and open, look for the opportunities that still exist, and take sensible risks. The rules are really the same as always. These include our most basic instinct: Refuse to become paralyzed when everyone else around you is doing just that.