Never Walked In High Heels

I’ve always yearned for a semi-mindless craft to do. One of the more annoying things about my disability is that there are very few activities which are actually ‘mindless.‘ I  spend most of my days doing what’s called motor planning, a skill that has become so automatic to most that most find it automatic themselves. The quickest example of motor planning I can come up with is what happens when you are on a climbing wall. (And before anyone questions me, yes I  have gone wall climbing several times in my life. That’s another story.) After going up a few meters one gets to a point where the grips become further apart and  you have to think about which grip you have to reach for next, whether you’re better off placing your hand or foot there, and at what angle of the grip you should place your hold. This is motor planning.

With almost any activity, be it going down the street or reading a book, all I see are angles. At what angle have my hands decided to operate at today? What’s the current range of motion of my fingers? How does the inventory of my current abilities relate to the size of the object that’s currently in front of me?

What is automatic to you, becomes a complex physics problem for me.

With all this logistical work you would think that I would enjoy just sitting, watching television and not having someone such as Pythagorus in my head going on about isosceles triangles but such is not the case. I, like any other person who has ever lived I  suppose, want to make stuff. Perhaps its part of my athetoid nature but I  can’t just be off. If my brian is off, my hands want to move.

When I  was in school and the teacher would give us various options to create a project. We could write a poem or an essay, makeup a story or create some model. Much to my parents chagrin, I  would always want to do the craftiest, most physically demanding option. I  suppose I  knew, somewhere deep down, that I  had the rest of my life to write essays.

Trying to find a simple hobby when all four limbs of your body are affected is like nailing jell-o to a wall. Eight years ago a friend tried to teach me to crochet. After one week all I  had was a tiny rat tail of a chain, most of the stitches formed by other people trying once again to teach me. I’ve tried all the supposedly wonderful art therapy vehicles such as pottery, photography, painting, mouth drawing, all the stuff which “anyone can do” and for one reason or another it just wasn’t the right medium.

Sometimes I  wonder why this desire to make a scarf for a friend is inside me. I  could be working on a novel or getting the production wheels moving on a new play debut and all I  want to be able to do is knit. Why is it what we are good at, we seem to think anyone is capable of while we lust for talents which were not endowed to us? Any yet, there is that tiny voice inside me that still wishes she could make a physical thing, rather that simply put ideas into people’s heads.

This past Christmas a friend and I  discovered loom knitting. Why had no one ever come up with this before? Give me the right kind of yarn, loom, chair, and project and I’m good to go (until I  drop a stitch and have to wait for someone to put it back on the loom for me). After a month of this activity, I  am already making it sound like less of an accomplishment than it actually is. Oh, its just a plastic loom, no real craftsperson does it this way. The stitches it makes are really simple. Why am I doing this? My work isn’t that impressive.

And maybe all that is true, I’m not really a natural born knitter. But then again, after over a decade of searching, I’ve found and activity that I can do without much thinking and, after I  got the knack, without much motor planning.

The first snow in London was pithy and came very late this year. My roomies opened the door last Saturday evening and squealed “it’s snowing,” in that tone of girlish excitement that you think you’ve grown out of, but somehow you never do.

“Oh, it is not!” I emphatically stated from my warm and cozy couch where I was camped out watching a Katherine Hepburn movie. I’m from Chicago, I know snow. London doesn’t do snow. At best we get dustings.

“Oh yeah? Look,” one of the girls opened the blinds with a flourish and turned out the lights. There, visible in the  brightness of street lamps, was snowing falling like it was the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and accumulating on the paver brick peacefully below. I looked up from the scarf I was knitting and smiled. Every muscle in my body instantly relaxed just by looking at the beauty outside.

The girls kept squealing as one put on her rubber wellies and hurriedly debated possible  clothing options to keep dry. She finally settled on an umbrella and, looking like someone who had just stumbled out of Narnia, she was off.

What is it about fresh snow, particularly the first snow of a season, that brings out the very best in people? Businessmen who have sat at their desk in suits all day suddenly tear out of their homes (with or without children) to make snowmen. Laughter comes cheaply and in abundance. We run to grab someone skidding on the ice, as if this act of nature, this thing of massive beauty, also brought just enough adversity to bind strangers together. Later snow falls will prove to be massively inconvenient, even frightening. But the first snowfall of the winter draws everyone to look outside, to see the seductive beauty of Nature so that all of us simultaneously agree: Despite all its short comings and heartache, this world is beautiful. 

Like so many other things, weather, which used to dictate our livelihood, is no more than an annoyance today. Few of us find ourselves praying for rain or warm weather, fearful that if we don’t get such favorable conditions our families will starve.  And out of the usual human arrogance, we find ways to control the weather, change the climate, until it suits our desires . It takes either great beauty or great terror from weather patterns we think we can predict, to remind us that there are forces beyond our control of whose mercy we are dependent upon.

We do not like to be reminded of our smallness.

Snow in many ways, is a wild beauty, able to turn savage if the wind changes direction or if  conditions alter. We have no control of how it envelopes us and for the amount of time we are under its power. Like any savage and grace-filled event, snow points to our assumptions of control as we run outside to build a snowman with strangers who have also been our neighbors for years. We cannot help but attempt to stick out our tongues and attempt to catch these mysterious and unique flakes, even if we think we are past such silliness. We than must concede that nothing in this world is in our control, and it was never meant to be.

Just think of all the beauty we would miss if this world was something we could fully conquer and control.

It is a strange fact of having a disability that independence and privacy are two extremely relative terms. For one to have an independent life, one must be in control of who takes care of daily tasks which are usually considered private such as bathing, dressing and, in some cases, even more intimate tasks. But these physical activities, “private” though they may seem, are far from private compared to the thoughts, emotions, and desires that go on inside of one’s mind. It is these elements, not the dressing or showers which dictates our actions in life. These are the elements which, when shared, establishes intimacy.

People often assume that I  have a much more intimate relationship with them then I  actually do. Old assistants smell out new ones with the possessive skepticism  of a German Shepard. The thought process is usually I’ve helped this woman with everything, who are you to walk in here and make her depend on you now? Of course, the new help didn’t make me dependent on anyone, I was always in need of physical help.

But this physical help does not give the person helping me permission to assume intimacy, or even worse, authority  over my life. This is a lesson that I was suddenly forced to learn last winter when a friend I was dependent on suddenly insisted that I should take her moral advice as well as her physical aide. We live in a world where we assume seeing each other’s physical nakedness make us presume intimacy on every level.  But service is no longer an act of servitude if it comes with any sort of expectation or desire for moral endowment.

Too often people go into service with the desire not to willingly serve, but to convert. It doesn’t matter if the service has religious, political, or even simple goodwill overtones, there is usually an agenda which is very well concealed, even from the servant. It can be as simple as waiting to appear to be a good person, but there is still an agenda. When this occurs servanthood becomes propaganda.

I have always been suspicious of the people who instantly want to help me whenever I walk into a room. The more enthusiastic they are about being a servant, the more skeptical I become. Maybe this is my own self righteousness speaking but after decades of living in constant dependency I have learned that the best servants are the ones which are least likely to realize they are serving at all.

As I get undressed in the evening, its hard not to talk about the days events. Such conversations are what lovers and partners discuss when they are getting ready for bed. But the person undressing me, my chosen assistant for the time, is not my spiritual advisor, my teacher, or my mother (except in the rare occurrences where that person is indeed my mother). The perceived intimacy between us is really no more than skin deep, proving that although I am naked, I do not have to be vulnerable.

For most of the past two months, I’ve been on a Facebook strike. Such abstinence seems to be unthinkable for someone of my generation. Facebook has been a part of my life since 2004 and a great way to keep up with friends since moving across the pond. Recently however, with my life taking some very odd turns and many of my friend’s choosing to go a more traditional route in their own lives, I needed a break. At my age, the holidays mean an onslaught of baby pictures and engagement announcements which, somehow, Facebook can manage to bundle together in some sort of conspiracy that can bombard you with the idea that everyone else in the world is young, beautiful, fertile, and knitting baby blankets.

During this time of self inflicted celibacy two events occurred. First, Facebook decided to turn itself into some sort of historical time capsule and second, a friend who had just announced that she was having twins, miscarried.

I think all of us in life hate to think that nothing, even the most natural and yet miraculous milestones we can have, is ever guaranteed. If the ring is on our finger or the pregnancy test shows a red plus sign, we have made a contract with fate. We are going to have reason to celebrate, we can shout it to the world in our Facebook statuses, and the happy event will happen. Guaranteed.

And on the one hand, why not? We should celebrate at full steam our times of joy. But many are finding out, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the hope for our lives we place in the future, sometimes doesn’t come. One week after my friend announced to the world her amazing news, hew new world was crushed. Despite our open book policy, it seems not a whole lot of miscarriages are announced on Facebook.

What will happen when we are able to look back at lives of the new people we meet and see that, well, there seems to be a kid missing from current family photos, or she used to wear a diamond ring and now she doesn’t? If its impossible to avoid pain and disappointment in our lives, do we really want our new acquaintances finding out about these events by our status updates and wall posts followed by years of silence?

Facebook, I believe, presents a unique problem in that it’s main population it that of young adults. Ours is a generation which has, seemingly, always been protected and was able to hold off being an adult just a little bit longer thanks to grad schools and the misleading belief thing things always improve over time. My friends are just entering a point where they are discovering loss and heartache. For many of them they do not know how to be cautiously optimistic.

Perhaps, by seeing disappointments of years past we make ourselves more vulnerable to prying eyes. Or maybe we are simply made aware of our vulnerabilities which are already there. We all have pain from our pasts we would like to forget, and pain coming at us which we could never imagine. Perhaps a tool such as Facebook allows us to share in our joys. But the question is: Do any of us have the strength which can only come from vulnerability in sharing each other’s sorrow?