Never Walked In High Heels

There are a few things in this world that I hate more than church shopping. Truth be told I think I would rather be hung upside down on my toenails than work for a place of worship. Sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of church can often be one of the most excruciating things about being disabled, particularly since everyone wants to lay hands on me in an effort to heal my disability. As a rule, the more traditional the church and the older the church, the more this embarrassing behavior occurs until eventually I feel sorry for the want to be faith healers that their God is so small that he can only work amongst able bodied people.

So when I felt the need to find a church in London I made a deal with God. I prefer to be known as one of Gods more petulant children and I informed him that I would visit one church. God had one shot to impress me with a congregation of church folk to keep me committed to going back every Sunday. If he couldn’t, I wasn’t going back and I would give up going to church for another three years.

When I first lay eyes on the pastor of my now adopted congregation, I was leery to say the least. His button up cardigan, sandy brown hair, and confident smile immediately made me think of past members of congregations who tried to encourage me when I needed not encouragement, thereby providing discouragement or attempted to put God in their own image. I was not repulsed, so I promised that I would come back a second time. By the following Sunday, I did just that and was alarmed when I discovered, without requesting it from anyone, a ramp laid down to cover the single step it took to get into the church building. They saw that a member of their congregation would be helped by providing wheelchair access and unassumingly they immediately did just that. It was the first time a church had ever done such a thing for me.

A few Sundays later the pastor told a sermon which heavily featured his mother who had died a number of years before from motor neuron disease, otherwise known in America as ALS. In the sermon he talked about being a young man and fighting off faith healers with a broomstick to get them to leave his mother alone. For him, the disease was not necessarily something to be healed as it was something that could provide a better understanding to who God is and what life is all about.

To say that something good would come out of something tragic is at best a cliché. Whenever I’m feeling depressed and someone said that God will change my pain into something that would glorify him, I honestly want nothing more than to punch that individual in the face. Sufferers sometimes can’t hear about the great joys which can inevitably come from suffering, nor should that be forced upon them during a time of mourning. When one has just experienced tragedy, it tests first of all an individual’s patience. We feel that we will be sad forever; that life will never move on and we will be forever stuck in mourning. I am sure there were many hours of desperation my pastor felt while watching his mother slip away from him. Being faced with suffering of course, begs us to question things about God and life which we would be more comfortable ignoring.

To say that it was because of his suffering mother that I decided to join my church and become an active member of it would be a underestimate of the rest of the congregation. Truth is, I was attracted to the church not for the charisma of the pastor, but because during my times o visiting no one had attempted to heal me. This proved that the congregation understood that life shouldn’t be simple and rather the value of life is much deeper than our shallow limitations of what it ought to be or ought to look like.

There is something immensely comforting and wonderful about experiencing healing from a person who has once been wounded himself. It means not only do they have a genuine desire to see a condition improve, but that they have also been through the darkest night and know when it is appropriate to cheer you up and when it is more appropriate to just hold you while you are suffering because there is little else that can be done with any amount of sincerity.

“The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak; They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”

—Edward Shillito in the poem “Jesus of the Scars”

Having someone who has suffered as a confidant and friend as well as a leader means that he knows about the difficult questions which inevitably pop up when one is miserable. With the answers he provides I know that he isn’t simply faking a positive response that the problem will go away on it’s own. When he was a young man, his mother said to me when some able body woman he grew up with and declined into what that was completely dependant on anyone for anything. Having a spiritual leader who knows the way such a life is in the frustration that comes from it, who knows pain and suffering as well as death and joy which are brought out from situations that one would prefer to avoid mean that there is a level of genuineness in the help he offers to give. It also means that he fully knows that this world is not how any of us would like to live it. However, he will tell me whenever I am in the middle of such frustrations due to my own disability now that the pain I feel is just for the time being.

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.

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.

Recently it was my birthday and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted on our hearts. These are the goals we are meant to reach for. These are the goals made for no one else but us. When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then racing for our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

A while back I lost a friend who informed under no uncertain terms that my aims in life were “unrealistic” and “It’s time for you to grow up anyway.” And it’s true, any dream you have as a young woman with a disability today is still highly unrealistic. There is no job field I can enter at this point with no typing skills and manual labor being next to impossible, where my lifetime career would be simple, straightforward, and predictable. Add to the fact that I work in the arts and the entertainment industry, which, according to him, is one of the most shallow industries in existence and you have a road map for someone trying to reach the moon without a rocket ship. He didn’t know it at the time I don’t think, but what my friend was asking me to do was to deny my dreams simply because the world wasn’t ready for them. Is unpreparedness ever a good reason to move on, particularly when it’s unpreparedness not on your behalf but on the behalf of the rest of the world? Would it be appropriate for an African-American fifty years ago to say that wanting to get a graduate school education at an institution like Vanderbilt was not a worthwhile dream simply because the school was located in an area that was still full of racial tension? Are we morally obligated to change our ambitions just because they might be difficult to reach or impossible given the current state of our society?

I can appreciate if someone has a child that is dependent on them or other obligations the strategy changes. Certain sacrifices must be made, particularly when it comes to earning a supporting those who are reliant on you.. But those of us who are able to get by and still repeatedly try to break down the walls we choose to leave standing might not necessarily have the sociological standard course of action. After all, if no one breaks down the walls that are obstacles in our own culture, they will never come down on their own accord. Rather, they will stay as imposing obstacles waiting for someone in the next generation to tear them down. And so, walls are made until someone is determined to make a ruckus and carry through with the demolition process fully.

Dreams are by nature just out of reach, and if they were easy to grasp and lasso down to the floor, would they be worthwhile dreams or just perpetuating the status quo. It is never acceptable to pass on your dreams simply because they are too difficult to accomplish. Difficulty is never a strong enough reason to quit anything.

There was a time when I was very very small, and I did not realize the limitations plastered on the wall. What I did realize was what my dreams were. At about the same age, I would go to sleep and not understand that the things I did after I went to bed and the images that came across my mind were not reality. The next morning I would ask my mom if she remembered flying over the moon with me or dancing with flowers on fairy dust patches. She would look at me and say “That didn’t happen, you dreamed it. It was a dream.” But it all felt so real to me, even after I woke up safely in my bed.

It’s the most vivid dreams, which no one else can see, that inevitably forces you to reach further than anyone without that dream would ever recommend.

We had been driving in the car for about 45 minutes when I proudly began to explain to my mother what I had learned in school that day. My legs were not anywhere near long enough to touch the floor of the car as I explained that certain letters made certain sounds. For example, the “B” made a “buh” sound. At that moment we pulled up to a stop light and I pointed to a sign and slowly read out: “B-A-N-K. That sign says bank.”  It was the first word my mother had seen me read out loud, and with that, I was on my way.

Now, my parents make it sound like they always knew I was smart. Maybe they did, but I doubt it. Having a child with special needs, it seems to me, has always been an area of great apprehension. What can she learn? What will she learn? How will she learn it?  Will it be enough, or will she need something more in her life that is beyond her mental grasp. The first words that I ever spoke, “shoes” and then “juice”.  My vocabulary doubled in a single day, something that I would later wish could happen again as I was studying for the SATs. But then afterwards, those were the only two words I could say until my mother took me to a speech therapist who ran a number of tests as she did for a great many children entering the early childhood development program. “Whatever you do, don’t speak in baby-talk to her, this one is very intelligent.”

“Intelligent? She says two words, shoes and juice. That’s it.”

“She understands a lot more than you realize.”

From that moment on my parents were never want to use a short word when a long word would expand my vocabulary. They would see other parents cradling their babies in supine and refuse to do so. They read everything they could get their hands on, experimented, and made absolutely certain under no circumstances I would be treated as a sub-normal child. In this way, I was brought up in an educated house. One night my father spent the last two dollars in his bank account to buy a set of used encyclopedias that were published twelve years before.  It was turning the pages of these books, which were older than I was, in a household that refused to stoop to sub normal standards simply because there was a little one in the house, that I acquired my language skills, and, as a result, my self confidence.

Language skills often seem to me as a summation of all you are. Children, of course learning spelling, don’t know this, and adults rarely see. But parents who want the best for their sons and their daughters realize it in full. To use proper language, interesting terms, and changes in words require a certain amount of devotion to reaching beyond your present state. A child with a brain injury, in a special education class, if he dares to read the right books rather than the ones the teacher deems “appropriate” for him can reach exponentially above the low standards the adults around him have set as his goal.  A waiter who refuses to use slang, and refuses to succumb to the standards of “simply a member of staff” may not only receive a higher number of tips, but also be sought after for additional opportunities which would not otherwise come his way if he was just trying to live from paycheck to paycheck without improving himself. The language we use are the building blocks to state who we are, where we come from, how we think of ourselves, and who we intend to be someday. Being someone who simply wants shoes and juice, or bigger goals like someone who probably intends on recognizing the importance of a bank, even at the age of five.

In London, I have a neighbor who routinely plays in our backyard with a best friend.  The two of them share tea parties in a bright pink tent. Yesterday, she ran out to ask my help on a school project about Pluto.

“What exactly do you know about Pluto”, she said, playing with her hair and trying to balance on the outside of her feet. At her age, she still cannot stand still for any length of time.

I thought back to her age, the time when my father would lay down next to me with an encyclopedia and read about any article I liked. I can still picture the ink drawing of Pluto as a ball of ice on the yellow onion-skin pages of our ancient Encyclopedia Britannica. I told her what I knew about orbits and eclipses, Pluto changing places with other planets and how long a year is on a planet that is so far away from the sun, it is only a ball of ice.  I told her everything about it my father had taught me. She smiled, thanked me, and ran back inside.

As soon as I walked through the door I called home to see what my parents were reading these days.

“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” –James Madison

The 188 pulls up to my stop and lowers its ramp. The nervousness in my stomach disappears for the time being and I am momentarily at ease. In my experience there is about a fifteen percent failure rate of bus ramps not opening up. Now I just have to worry about the bus ramp opening up when I want to get off.

“It sure was nice of them to put those ramps on buses so you can use them wasn’t it,” a little old Irish lady says to me. Nice? No, actually, it isn’t nice. It is the law. When people with disabilities chained themselves to buses as a form of protest, it took years for the lawmakers to take action. It wasn’t until five years ago that all buses were required to have ramp access before leaving the depot. And even with that rule in effect, I still can’t get on a bus a large percent of the time. Call the accessible transit situation in London frustrating, hellish, difficult, or even unfair if you’d like. But you cannot call it “nice.”

I’m always a bit bewildered by people on either side of the Atlantic who insist that disability legislation is something nice for lawmakers to come up with. I’m with Madison on this one, it is not the role of the government to be charitable or nice. Establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty and well as promoting the fact that all men are created equal is not merely something “nice” to do. One is baffled why the subject of disability rights is seen as an as issues hand-outs rather than justice.

President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army to Little Rock High School to escort nine African American children into having the same education as their white peers. We do not look back on that event and say that Eisenhower was being “nice.” We do not give women the right to vote because it is a matter of social grace. Nor should we promote equal access to public transportation because it can act as a form of alms. Perhaps it is a statement about our society’s views of individuals with physical limitations that we choose to see such issues of inaccessibility as a form of inconvenience rather than social injustice.

The bus stops in Russell Square when myself and the woman alight. I again feel a sense of relief once I reach the pavement and turn to get to my appointment, smiling at the woman out of trained politeness. Looking behind me I see her walking away slowly, dependent on her wooden cane. I can’t help but wonder, as her body becomes increasingly uncooperative with age, if notices that her world is shrinking as well. Perhaps she doesn’t even realize that growing older and loosing stamina shouldn’t result in a smaller world.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

I’ve seen the commercials. The male announcer almost teases you with the idea that all your problems will be solved if you only buy the correct application for under a dollar. And from the stance of creative businesswoman, the App Store for the iphone is enthralling. With no overhead, a constantly changing storefront and boundless creativity, this is, without a doubt, the correct formula for the next stage of entrepreneurship for the new frontier.

If only that ‘boundless creativity’ would come in the form of faster evolution.

After all, what exactly is the use of a program which is an alarm clock on a device where one is automatically build in. Better yet, how about coming to and end of a fine dinner and being unable to calculate the tip without the help of your trusty technological companion. Or there’s always the program, that tells you about what other programs have come out and which other programs you need. (This one, much to my surprise, was not created by Apple.)

I bought an iphone in hopes to make my life as a disabled woman easier. With life in this position one is dependent on barons of industry, invention, and software to make life not simply more convenient but also simply livable. To say that my iphone has changed my life would be an understatement. But I was also one of the first people investing in voice activation all the way back in 1994, and have since thrown money at nearly every piece of assistive technology conceivable. In the case of adaptive tech hardware and software, it really doesn’t matter what sort of resources you have, if can’t be sold to the mainstream population the software will not advance.

This is how we get over 200 software developers which create alarm clocks, and no program that will actually call a London black cab. After all, my friends argue, its easy to hail a cab off the street. But figuring out what fifteen percent of your dinner bill is… that’s a real challenge.

The App Store illustrates to me that the leaders of industry are few and far between while those who have the programming skills but lack the imagination are well in abundance. It’s proof that just because there are lots of hands which can make the industry move forward, without the brains there is little guarantee of it doing so. Looking at what sells today will only show you what you should’ve been selling yesterday. And so to hop on the ‘alarm clock bandwagon’ only serves to tell you where the industry is. As with any other form of progress the market has to look to the needs of people who are not in the mainstream to figure out what comes next.

I never really realized how heavy an egg was until last week. As I put it to my friend yesterday when we were meeting for lunch, “I’ve always had people to crack eggs for me.”

This year, in a feeble effort to simulate Julie and Julia, my neighbor and I decided that we would start baking each Saturday. Four weeks into our challenge and we’ve thus far made Victoria sponge, carrot cake muffins, a diabetic coma inducing chocolate meringue (aka a gooey chocolate stack), Norwegian cinnamon rolls, and a much bigger mess on my kitchen table than I ever knew was possible. My neighbor will tell you otherwise but the mess is mostly due to my interactions. During our second week of baking I decided that this had to be a therapeutic activity rather than simply that of leisure. My mother tells me that this is proof that I’m adopted from a bunch of militant Germans.

Its not that my family isn’t so much of the baking type as it is my lack of life experience which make the idea of baking so novel. With being even semi dependent on other people comes a huge amount of both tactile and practical ignorance. People make you a cup of tea because it is either impossible or you’d kill yourself trying to make one. As a result, you don’t know how your kettle works, nor how long you steep your tea for, or why different people can take the same request (will you make me a cup of tea please) and have it come out totally differently. Don’t even think of asking my how my washing machine works, all I know is I can’t turn any of the knobs on it.

On Saturdays I am once transported back to my childhood. Actually, that cliché is incorrect as it suggests that I have experienced the sensations of baking before. I have never done anything remotely like baking before. When I go to sprinkle flour, I am still shocked at how cool it feels to the touch. I marvel at how easily it slips through my fingers. I get frightened every time I come within about one yard of even a butter knife, irrationally terrified of stabbing myself with it. And I still refuse to try and crack an egg. I can only see disaster coming out of any attempt of egg cracking. This is where my overly logical adult mind kicks in no matter how much I fight to be childlike. It I manage to crush an egg rather than crack it, I’ve done it wrong, ruining the whole thing. My adult mind should then logically tell me that the world will keep turning and there’s more eggs in the basket as it were, but my mind has yet to reach that level of maturity yet.

Learning how to crack an egg has become my newest goal. Each week my neighbor holds an egg out towards me, lovingly offering me an opportunity to challenge myself. And each week I shake my head, agreeing to watch her do it for another week. Watching someone else do it correctly doesn’t teach you half of what you learn by doing it badly yourself. And so I continue to be surprised by the weight of an egg, have no idea exactly what it takes to crack its shell, and always waiting for someone else to do it for me.

I can tell that it is him pushing my wheelchair without looking behind me. The way his black gloved hand grabs the push bar sends a surge of confidence through the entire chair. I can feel it in my spine. And then after that shudder comes a feeling of such relief and relaxation that I sit back in my chair a bit more peacefully. I don’t have to look for every crack in the sidewalk, every possible stick my front wheels could get stuck on. My eyes, my mind, my muscles can all rest for a few moments knowing that he has my back and is thinking for both of us.

We dodge in and out of the commuters at London Bridge Station, a fog of air coming out of out mouths giving the only visible sign of exertion. He tells me that people stare at us all the time. I have never noticed, and he has long stopped caring… or maybe he never did to begin with. Our contrast is almost more shocking than the obvious. Me in my white fur hat, him in a battered bomber style one. His coat tattered and grey, I’ve just gotten mine for Christmas, the bright red making me look like a special holiday doll which is never allowed to be played with. Rarely do people comment on the fact we do not look like we belong together. In our circle of friends it’s assumed we can get by in the most chaotic of situations.

Arriving at the elevator we wait alongside mothers with their young children draped in fleece blankets and tucked inside a multitude of layers. The women avoid eye contact with us. He and I are clearly the odd ones out. But the children, even I can see them look at me with as much curiosity as they’ve ever had. This is when my friend’s imagination gets the better of him. He leans over and whispers in my ear.

“It’s almost like they’re saying ‘wow, she has a really big stroller. Maybe if I play my cards right, I won’t ever have to get out of mine.’”

This is why he and I get along so well.