Never Walked In High Heels

We call them Chuggers, which is a combination of “charity” and “muggers.” They are the people who stand on the street wearing matching t-shirts and holding clipboards in an effort to get you to give them money for whatever cause they are currently representing. These people actually are not volunteers; they are outsourced. Turns out some bureaucratic genius came up with the idea of having an agency that will be willing to stand on the street and solicit donations for any cause. One day they might be collecting for starving children in Africa; the next for the Humane Society, and the next day for child refugees in Pakistan, followed that weekend by underprivileged children in India. They are not passionate about any of the issues for which they are soliciting donations. Seeking out alms to protect those in need has now become a conveyor belt of individuals able to change their opening paragraph to suit any charity at will.

Due to my electric wheelchair, for the most part I can successfully avoid Chuggers. They are always on Tottenham Court Road and I am always able to weave in and out of them with great dexterity. Today however I was not so lucky. An overly cheery blonde Chugger got in my way and asked one of the most amusing questions I have heard in a while.

“What are you doing to help children with disabilities?”

She then proceeded to specifically name my disability as what her organization is raising money for. She isn’t seeing my disability and naming it, it truly is what this organization is devoted to. I look at her; the situation is absolutely comic. One would think that I out of all people would receive a get out of jail free card as to avoiding charity markets. After all, they are supposed to be giving money to people like me not demanding it. Today I can’t resist.

“So tell me more about what it’s like to have this disability?” I ask, just testing her knowledge a little more. She is good. She has definitely memorized the pamphlet. The problem is, she is preaching to the choir, considering the fact that I’m sitting right in front of her. I can’t help but press my luck even further.

“Wow that’s awful! How do those kids even begin to cope, what a terrible situation to grow up in.”

She thinks she has me now and offers me a pen and form to write down my bank details. “I’m sorry, I can’t write”.

“You can’t write at all?” She sounds the rare combination of disappointment and surprise. This was not in her training pamphlet when she signed on to be a Chugger. “Why not?” In the UK, Chuggers cannot write down your bank details, you have to do it for them as some sort of legal privacy act. Because I can’t write down mine, she knows she is not getting a donation.

“Because I have a disability”

This explanation has never occurred to her. I have no choice at this point but to shrug my shoulders and drive away.

For most people, disabilities don’t really have a place. They don’t recognize the problems caused by having a disability until they confront someone who is fully immersed in it. We shuffle our ill and dying into homes where experts can care for them so we don’t have to face the failures of the human body which will inevitably become our own. Worse, in Western culture we seem to like it that way.

But once we get to know someone with that condition, then all of a sudden the charity name disappears entirely. It turns into the condition that “Bob” has, but he’s able to live his life anyway and make us laugh at the local pub. We don’t see the weakness of people we know even when we are standing a few feet away from them. Rather, we see them as an entire being as opposed to fragmentary conditions. This is the difference between raising money for a cause and being passionate about one. This is why I call the people who stand on the corner of Tottenham Court Road Chuggers rather than charity collectors.

As I went down the street after my encounter, I couldn’t help but think of her original question which was actually quite poignant. What am I doing to help disabled children? The best thing for kids with disabilities is to have a society which sees them not as a cause or a victim but as unique individuals capable of racing towards their dreams and being exactly who they want to be. For disabled children, the greatest gift I can give them is not from my bank account but rather, be a successful adult and refuse the easy classification as a victim in need of a specified charity. Although, maybe that’s how the overly cheery Chugger saw me. She didn’t see the disability at all until it impeded her work. Maybe all she saw was the successful adult going down the street who wanted to help in any way they can.

I had a friend who became unexpectedly pregnant in between her junior and senior year at university. I was a year above her and had no idea of the situation until I was sent a picture of the child shortly after it was born. It was beautiful but shocking to think that a friend of mine was now able to replicate herself. She was ahead in her class credit, so took a semester off to go through the pregnancy as well as completing summer school the summer before her graduation. She graduated on time and realistically with a better plan than any of us had at the time we walked across the stage. Another friend of mine within three weeks of each other discovered that two of her sisters had also become pregnant out of wedlock. Her family is extremely conservative and were shocked as well as embarrassed by the entire situation. The amount of angst and anger which was brought on as a result of two new babies was in many ways surprising and not particularly loving.

The thing about families is it’s become a cliché; there is no such thing as a “normal” family. However to take it a step further, families in order to function (as opposed to simply being normal) are based around forgiveness. Normal people find it very difficult to turn the other cheek and move on. But unlike what most people would do given the chance, functional families are able to react with more love to these sort of situations and problems simply because if you are in a family together, you are stuck with each other for the rest of your lives. Run away as far as possible and they are still genetically connected to you so you might as well get used to it and recognize that their faults are probably pretty similar to your own, or at the very least, as difficult for other people to handle.

The love of families represents the type of love and commitment, as well as sacrifice, we are supposed to show to just about everyone else in the world. But by nature you are dedicated to finding the very best for your family; this is natural instinct. I’ve known families who moved into houses without furniture just so there children could attend a particularly brilliant school district. The stories abound about mothers who discover that their children are violin prodigies and then take night shifts in order to pay for lessons which cost a days wages.

There are no normal families. Ideally, we should be able to find a balance of what is good for the people that are blood related to us, whether it be stretching our boundaries of forgiveness to accept the prodigal son back one more time or simply forgetting about the fact that he didn’t take the trash out yet again. We have to learn to afford each others grace and hopefully begin to expand that talent of giving grace out into other parts of the world until other people who aren’t necessarily related to you by blood receive that type of love and sacrifice from you. A family teaches us to accept and tolerate people as they are. Whereas we would normally walk away from friends who hurt us in the same way our family does, there is no escaping the memories of growing up together and the good times.

When I told someone of my friends original plan to have the baby and then continue on with her job in the middle-east while being a single mother and waiting for the father to get out of medical school, they replied “That sounds like a stable solution, but it’s still a bizarre and improper way to start a family.” And in a way, they are right. It is bizarre and it doesn’t go by traditions, but in the end, what we accept from our loved ones is exactly that: bizarre and unexpected. One might as well acknowledge its strangeness at the start of establishing a family.

He is at it again. After four beers in the course of ninety minutes, my friend is drunk. Or at least teetering on the edge of drunk and doing a fine job remaining stable while standing. But what is more stereotypical of the entire situation is not only is he drunk, he is in the middle of an argument and everybody is looking at me to put in my two cents regarding his unbearably loud opinion. I do the one thing I have been trained to do in this situation after coming across it several times. I grab my iPhone and begin to check my email as a distraction.

His argument is, regardless of the fact that he is highly intoxicated on beer and cider, nonetheless poorly thought out and I want absolutely none of it. Everyone at this point is looking at me beginning to ask questions which are directed at getting me to let go of my phone and participate, and I’m simply (adamantly you might say) uninterested. I know of the flaws in his argument. I’ve heard him argue the same point (even every once in a while while sober!) a million times before and it’s simply not interesting. It would be like a low speed chase. He says something which directly contradicts the sentence he said before and in this particular form of reediting, with the assistance of people also drinking alcohol and refusing to listen closely, they all buy it and his rant is able to continue. I’m beginning to wonder if it will eventually become indefinite.

The thing about being in a wheelchair most of the time is that there is absolutely no room for you to have a bad argument. People still automatically assume that I am mentally disabled or incapable of creating any form of reasonable logic. Even while drunk, my friend ranting in a pub gets automatically more respect assigned to him simply because of the fact that he is an able bodied man and able to stand up at the bar (barely) than I am as a woman in high heels sitting down in an electric wheelchair. At best, if I was using the level of pressure which he was using, I would receive people’s pity and at worst I would be ignored or mowed over by some other drunk guy who desperately needs an ego boost.

At this point in time with my friend gathering quite the crowd around him I have checked my email, texted my father, checked my stock, and played a game of Sudoku. Then he said something which for a sober woman, regardless of any sort of brain injury is just too good to pass up in terms of sheer absurdity. I turned my phone off and slipped it into my bag.

At this, everyone turned around and looked at me, “You finally decided to join the conversation?” The old man who always sits in the corner of the pub smiles at me, as he knows what’s coming. He’s been here long enough and seen enough political debates inside the walls of this ancient public house to know that I’m about to make my move and no one is quite ready for what I’m about to say except for him, and me.

By the time I finish my argument; which takes approximately thirty seconds, it is silent. Someone offers to buy me a cider and I quickly make a joke in order to change the tone. The argument is thankfully over and things can get back to at least being pleasantly entertaining even if they will never be profoundly educational. I am ready to have a drink. I am with friends and they all know me in a way that allows me around them to let myself go and fully be the full, silly self without being judged. My friends in this pub will never see me as incapable.