Never Walked In High Heels

Last week, while I was on holiday, Never Walked in High Heels finished its first year of publication. A year ago, a friend said that he read some basic rules for starting an electronic publication and they all recommended the same thing: patience.

I always have thought myself to be a very patient person until about a year ago. Due to my disability, I’m always last in line, waiting for doors to be unlocked, and dealing with my own slowness in daily tasks. If anyone was going to be impatient it was never going to be me. And then I became a working professional. And, if that wasn’t enough, I was working in a world that wasn’t used to seeing people like me work. To top it all off: I’m working in the arts.

Here’s the thing they never tell you during those inspirational movies about crusaders who beat the odds and come out changing the world on the other side of their struggles, there was always a ton of waiting around. If the struggles themselves don’t get you, the waiting game surely will. Take a look at some all time favorites such as My Left Foot. It looks like all the sudden Christy Brown wakes up in the morning and decides to write ‘Mother’ on the kitchen floor. What you don’t see, is the ten years before, when Brown’s mother stared at him wondering what she did wrong, nor do you see the months of laborious and profoundly unclear dictating it took to write the books he’s so famous for. (You also don’t see him choking to death on a pork chop after supposedly being abused by his wife who may have been a lesbian… but hey, even Hollywood has its limits.)

Gandhi’s hunger strikes get condensed to a quarter of an hour. Helen Keller is saying “wa-wa” in the first scene. And William Wilberforce’s twenty years of fighting against the slave trade takes about two hours on film.

I remember once I asked a friend, who was an ex-cop, if crime shows were accurate. He laughed and said, “if they wanted to make it realistic, they’d have to add a lot more paper work and cups of coffee. Nobody would watch it.”

The truth is, I am impatient when it comes to myself, my dreams, and what I want to accomplish. And as I compare my readership this week to what I thought it would be a year ago, I am disappointed. And, if I allow it, I begin to let the waiting game beat me because I’m falling short of my own unreasonable expectations.

A year of Never Walked in High Heels means just under one hundred and fifty essays, two freelance assignments, and a steadily increasing readership. If anyone else accomplished this, I would have said “well done.” Somehow my biggest fault is to want to live in the future, rather than the here and now which will inevitably get cut in the edited version. So when I sit down tonight and, like a good little entrepreneur, sketch our my plan for the next year, I will have to have my roommate hide all the inspirational movies she can find.