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.

The orchid on my desk has begun to bud. Within the green capsule, clenched tight as if is was holding a precious pearl, there is a single violent red streak which holds a sign of the color to come. But for right now, the bud is mostly green, the stalk stands erect, shooting out from the pot on my desk, ignoring the fact that my roommate and I sit downstairs most nights planning Christmas cakes and cookies to make over the next month.

I bought this particular lady’s slipper orchid last June off of eBay, when it became otherwise impossible to find such a flower in red. I had successfully gotten orchids to rebloom for the past three years and, growing increasing tired of seeing the same orchids redundantly displayed at Tesco,  and desperately wanting to grow a  flower which was a passionate shade of red, I invested in an purchase I was otherwise clueless about. So much so that when I opened up the plant I quickly went back to my computer to ask the farmer why he used pesto as a potting medium… It ended up being a symbiotic form of algae.

For the next six weeks the little orchid did nothing but drop leaves on alternating sides. A total of five leaves turned  yellow and dropped off. Each time I’d loose another one  I would think it was over and the planted had righted itself after suffering and conquering whenever ailed it. But then inevitably another leaf  would crinkle slightly before turning a vibrant combination of yellow and red and dying. I was feeling as if I had no business buying an orchid outside of Tesco in the first place.  I knew nothing of taking care of something which had so much potential for beauty and grace. Frantically I attempted my cure all solution for every problem: I googled everything possible I could find on orchid care. Moving the plant into one room, then back out, watering once a week then everyday, I frantically tried to take everyone’s advice at once. Finally I decided on the obscurely obvious.

The orchid knew more about raising itself than I could ever know.

So, I brought the plant back to my desk, gave it a little bit of water each day, and resigned myself to plant succumbing to the fate of his choice. There was nothing I could do to force it  otherwise.

And then it lost another leaf.

Then, after a while and for reasons known only to itself, the plant started to be happy again. No longer did the leaves fall or turn yellow. Those that remained were healthy, smooth, and aligned themselves with the sun. There wasn’t panic every time I looked at my desk and saw it. Within a few more weeks a stem grew and a bud began to form, creating an optimistic fascination for me rather than blame and dread. Cells, multiplying on a molecular level at an alarming rate,  I watch day after day at the plant reads its own blueprint of how it should build itself. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to make such a feat occur. When the flower opens up, its intricacies and architecture will be of an incalculable mathematics. And I cannot help but humbled by the fact that all I can do is give the plant a little bit of water every few days. Much of anything beyond that is just interfering.

My assistant carries my duffel bag to the stage door and stops. My body, covered with baby oil to simulate sweat, takes its last calm breath before mayhem begins. After I knock on the door, I won’t be able to go at my pace, my speed until we make our final bow in exactly eighty four minutes. Until then I will be moving at performance pace, performance speed, trying frantically to make jokes and complex ideas understood, keeping the audience’s energy up, all while making every stylized move seem natural. This is the job of a performer. This is the job I always wanted. I raise my hand to knock  on the door. My sister in the play opens is and looks appalled, just  like the director intended. I barge onto the stage in my wheelchair.

Instantly and, it seems, undetectable to a great many people, I feel the audience clench up.  It’s not me, I’ve been in enough performances to know what nerves are and how to adjust to them. This isn’t me, its them. Even in our modern age it seems we are still living in a world where as soon as a professional actor with a disability comes onto the stage, the audience becomes nervous, as if they are expecting to watch a train wreck in slow motion. Its  the threat of live performance and part of what makes theatre so addictive. Although we don’t want them to, the idea that action on stage is happening in real time and that performers might drop the ball puts us at the very edge of our seats. We like this risk, to a certain extent.

Unless you put a performer like me onstage. Trained by professionals myself, my performance style is unique at best. My speech is of a slightly different cadence, my movements aren’t always fluid. But my intentions are precise, my ideas clear and innovative, and my stories are, for the most bit, entertaining. And yet each time I go onstage I feel the wave of nerves from an audience wondering if they are about to witness a train wreck. Can she remember her lines? What did she just say?  How long is  she going to be  onstage? Who cast her in the first place and why  didn’t they get a proper actor?

Before you protest and say it’s nerves getting the better of me, I have a confession to make. In marketing my shows disability is never mentioned. My plays really aren’t about disability as it just isn’t a topic which interests me. Leave ghettoized theatre to quota seekers and box tickers. I write the story of human beings which I can play for two reasons. First, I am honestly bored. No one else is casting me in work and many of the companies who aim to do otherwise don’t write interesting characters with disabilities. By accomplishing both I am creating a sound body of work for myself. Contrary to all rumors, this is a top priority for any artist. One must  create work which excites you, if you ever want to have a shot at exciting anyone else. Secondly, my plays are about the human condition. Disability is meant to be a metaphor which allows the audience to lock into a character, not an implacable monolith of a topic. As such, I don’t advertise my plays as being disability art any more than  Whitman saw his poetry to be about homosexuality. Art is a reflection of the human condition which is universal, provided of course, we don’t foolishly become too bogged down by the specifics.

So in a way I’m asking for trouble. I don’t warn potential audience members of a major characteristic of the piece, one which, in fact, might make a number of people very uncomfortable. To my knowledge there is no disability advisory warning or any plot spoilers required for theatrical advertising. Anybody should be able to come on stage in the course of an evening and, so long as their acting abilities hold up, the audience should accept they belong in that story. And throughout western theatre history, the range of acceptable actors has grown to include multiple genders, ethnicities, ages, and a host of other factors. Actors with disabilities should stay in disability theatre it seems. Outside of myself, they are  rarely seen in the West End. And with an audience reaction like what I’ve witnessed, who can blame the producers for not casting people with disabilities. A nervous audience is rarely a paying audience.

While onstage, there is little I can do to ease audience tension except play me role well which, admittedly, is easier some nights than others. I am tied to a script, my hands bound to certain actions at certain times. As much as I would like to call the audience out and say ‘trust me would ya,’ it can’t happen. I am told by friends that after a few minutes the tension dies down and the audience begins to feel more at ease. If this happens I can’t tell when it occurs. By that time I’m so far in the story I’ve forgotten about the audience’s existence. I have taken note of the tension but refused to take it on. I know my work is good and the audience can’t walk out. The door is shut, the lights are low, and for the next hour and a half they have to deal with the surprise of having an actor with a disability on stage.  If that’s such a shocking idea, then I don’t care what the reviews say, the fact the piece exists is enough.

What more could any artist ask for?

Through Fire and Friendship

By the time the phone was ringing on the other end of the line I questioned whether or not he ever wanted to hear from me again. It had been two years to the day since we last spoke and that conversation had not ended well. “Come back,” he had said to me. “Move to New York and…” for him the answers seemed so easy. To me they sounded trite. I screamed, he pushed back, and then nothing. That conversation was over and we went our separate ways.

The sound of an American telephone ringing its single long ring sounded foreign to me now. I had dialed the long-remembered number with a shaky hand after reading the news. His entire house had burned to the ground seven days before from being struck by lightening. And while no one was home on that fateful night, including his two dogs, nothing could be saved from the rubble. I called him out of gut reaction, thinking of his home and the beautiful things in it. In my younger days he had always seemed to me to be The Great Gatsby himself, with the exact home and life I had wanted. Yet, when he had invited me to do just that two years ago I had rejected him furiously, in a justified rage which burned out of control and smoldered for far too long. And now I hadn’t wanted his life for quite some time. I had my own. I am happy now, in London. Each day I find that my roots get deeper here, making me more and more stable in a town I am certain, for now at least, is my home. I had burned bridges with him to stay here. Now I wondered if he would let me swim back to meet him at the very least.

I wasn’t expecting him to pick up. He’s the type of man you always have to try a hundred and sixty seven times to get ahold of until it happens. I gasped his name and he shouted mine. And then the line went dead. Did he really hate me that much or had Skype failed me yet again? A screen popped up on my computer asking me a simple question: “Please tell us how you would rate your call?”

AWFUL. MISERABLE. I want to hunt down the moron who invented Skype this very moment and rip out his toenails after chucking my iMac into the River Thames. Somehow this wasn’t an option. I clicked cancel and redialed.

He picked up and said my  name first this time.

“Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“Nothing. Wait. No. Call me at this exact same time tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said reaching for my phone and wondering what meeting I had to cancel to make this call.

“Oh and, I’m sorry I have been such a crummy friend lately.”

“Me too.” We hung up. I couldn’t remember who forgave who.

“We are rebuilding,” he told me confidently. “It’ll take years to get it back to where it was, but we want to do it. I feel obligated in a way. It was such a lovely house and just added so much to the town.” I knew he was right. The home had most likely been featured in a plethora of home and garden magazines in the past two years. He had always loved opening his home up to people. I could tell this is what he was missing the most. “And when its all done we’ll have the biggest party you can imagine.” I already knew I wanted to be there.

He and I spoke for over an hour, which, for a man fielding calls from insurance people while trying to rebuild his life, is a very long time. I told him of my own fires over the past years, more metaphorical than his, perhaps, but every bit as searing. Two years ago he caught me at the front end of it. These fires were far from being put out but at least, for now they seemed to be under control.

“It sounds to me as if there is more than one way to burn a house,” his voice had changed dramatically. He was right. My own fires had forced me to stay here. Even when he could not comprehend it, I had to stay in London. I could not go ‘home.’ There was no home to go back to anymore. It is true, once you leave home, you can’t go back again.

There was the ash and rubble of the past several years. There were times of playing the fiddle while the flames raged on because there was nothing left to do. From all of this I had stumbled out, changed and transformed into a woman rather than the teenage girl he met thirteen years before. A few short years ago I thought fires shouldn’t happen. Now I’m a bit better at calmly walking through them without getting as burned. My friend had missed a good many of these fires over the past two years, even though they had been burning long before that. Maybe if he had been around the flames wouldn’t have gotten so high and enveloped me as much. But then again, without it all burning down, I wouldn’t have to get up out of the ashes and rebuild either. Without that, I wouldn’t be able to off my strength as a grown woman. Now that we had reconnected after two years I was his equal. And when everything goes up in smoke around you, sometimes what you need most is a friend who has also gone through the rubble and made it out the other side.

“It sounds as if you are exactly where you belong.” The silence was deafening on my end as I let these words sink it. This was what I longed to hear him say these past two years. It was all over. This fire had been smothered, the rubble cleared, and out of the ashes and destruction from two years ago came a new and stronger friendship, made purer by the flames.

“Let me know know if I can do anything for you.” Things were winding down and I just wanted to reach out and hold him in whatever way I could.

“I think you just did,” was all he said.

I hung up telling Skype that my call was ‘excellent with no problems.’ Walking into my room, I opened my window and looked over at Canary Wharf on a clear summer’s afternoon. I could feel my dress flapping at my ankles in the breeze. I think for my friend purified things were already appearing in the rubble after the fire. Our phone call was one of them and a redeemed friendship was another. They are small in the face of catastrophe, but they are glints and gleams of treasures  to come. What mattered was, after the fires, we both knew that there were some things worth the effort of digging out.

When our eighth grade teacher assigned us to create a family tree, mine was the size of four large poster boards taped together. We were to find the names, dates of birth and deaths going back three generations before ourselves. Mr. Bowman, our teacher said that if we knew our parents names, birthdays, etc and our grandparents should be able to do the same. The assignment sheet ended with the statement “just go as far back in your family tree as you can.”

Thanks to some very adventurous relatives, my drive to be class valedictorian, and a father who harbors some not so secret passions for family research, my family tree went  back sixteen generations and included soldiers enlisted in every war between the American Revolution and the Second World War. Mine, I have often been told, is a family tree peppered with people who sought out lives full of adventure and opportunities. Over and over these quests led them back to America and back to defend the country that was, for them, the land of opportunity.

Not long ago I was reminded of this as my plans for the future were mentioned, plans that didn’t include going back to the United States any time soon.

“How can you think of doing that? Don’t you realize how much your fore fathers gave up  just so you could have the advantages of being an American,” I often feel as though wanting to live somewhere else puts me on par with Benedict Arnold as people whom I normally consider to be very open minded suddenly start going on about how enlisting in the US army should be required for all citizens and how freedom is never free.

I know freedom isn’t free and opportunity doesn’t come cheaply. I am an actress with a disability and I have chosen to immigrate half way around the planet to have a shot at chasing my dreams.

Within the past year alone, I’ve worked with two different television networks,  contracted my play to premier in central London, and worked with a major casting director. And while all these opportunities are available in the United States, my disability is seen as an even bigger hindrance to my artistic career there than it is here. If I was born to be an artist, the land of opportunity is where I can achieve the dreams and ambitions I have set for myself to achieve.

Because my ancestors crossed the ocean in the 1600′s, one can hardly argue that they “came to America, the land of opportunity.” The country that we now call the United States didn’t exist when they boarded a ship headed for a place which, at that time, only existed in rumors and letters. The act of immigrating to America, rebelling against the king of England, and defending the territory against the red coats, was not so much an act of sacrifice as it was an act of risk. Nobody, even as recently as one hundred years ago, knew what America would become. No one in my family came to America because it had been branded “the land of dreams.” People who came much later, no doubt came as a result of such titles. My ancestors came because risking everything to get to a place which might lead them to a life closer to the one they dreamed of outweighed the risk of not doing so.

Am I rebelling against my forefathers if I decide to pick up and live my life in the land of Mad King George and the rest? Hardly. They picked up their families and moved to follow what their dreams dared them to do. No doubt the family members they left behind mentioned sacrifices their ancestors made in attempts to keep order and stability in the family. But dreams hardly ever take much notice of man made constructs, even ones as seemingly grand as nationalities and traditions.

After all, if my ancestors were willing to pack up and leave everything they knew to even attempt to have a life they dreamed of, am I actually rebelling if I am willing to do likewise?

“You are a very very brave young woman,” she said turning towards me and placing one hand on her walker for stability. We were on a pedestrian island in the middle of Trafalgar Square, making it halfway across the street before the light changed color. For me it was because I had arrived at the crosswalk towards the end of the green cycle that I had gotten only partway across the street. I had seen this woman edging across long before I myself had reached the crosswalk and, due to her age and gait, only had made it this far.

“Not as brave as you,” I replied, smiling at her gumption. If there is one intersections which distresses me above any of the others in London it is Trafalgar Square. Here, cars guide their way through a maze which resembles a bowl of spaghetti more than an intersection. For every crosswalk there is at least one pedestrian island which warns you that crossing in one go may be difficult for some. Indeed, the lights a choreographed in such a way that it almost takes a study in geometric principles to work out how the lights can be timed in your favor. And, to top it all off, being one of the most famous and photographed squares in the world means that when you are there, you feel like one is at the centre of the universe and everyone in all galaxies both known and unknown is watching you attempt to cross from one end of the square to the other in some sort of existential trek, metaphorically symbolizing the frailty of human efforts in the attempt to strive for meaning.

Or a least that’s my perception. My friends think I’m nuts and offer the advice “when you see the green guy go, when you see the red guy stop.” Thanks.

Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t let my grandmother cross Trafalgar Square alone. And the idea of anyone else over the age of seventy five doing so made me very nervous. I edged forward to offer assistance. Maybe she could hold on to the back of my chair to gain support to cross the street. Even when one is dependent on everyone else, it is still impossible to squash the reflex to help someone else in need when you see it.

“In my day, young women like you barely even left the four walls of their home unless they were heading for a shelter during an evacuation. Good for you.” I froze.

In London, it is impossible for me to look into the face of an older person without wondering if they had been around during World War II. Unlike the majority of working age Londoners, those from the generation who survived the Blitz still look you in the eye. And every once in a while, I catch a fierce gleam inside of the person, without exchanging any dialogue which says “I have seen parts of this city reduced to rubble. I have seen it built back up again. I know that life is filled with both pain and joy.”

This was a woman who had survived much in London, her eyes asserted it. Which is why I was shocked that she would ever call me ‘brave.’ A person who had watched her country be attack by enemy fire when victory wasn’t certain surely cannot begin to find courage in a young woman crossing the street on a sunny day, holding a patent leather bag with one hand and getting ready to dial her iphone with the other.

When local heroes are interviewed we hear them say over and over “I was just doing what anyone else would’ve done in my position.” And perhaps heroism, at it’s root is not about what you do when the stakes are high, but rather what you do when there isn’t much of a choice. Live or die. Fight or roll over. Go out or be a shut in. Cross the street or stay stagnant. In extreme situations, there really are just two options. And more often than not “heroes” are the ones who choose the more desirable option rather than facing destruction.

If two women on opposite ends of the age spectrum can meet at a crosswalk and admire the drive for life in the other, then the best things in this world are both inexplicable and universal. I don’t feel particularly brave just because I choose to cross the street, even in Trafalgar Square. In my mind it’s what everyone does, so I do it too. And maybe those who saw bombs falling on London, who waited it St. Paul’s Cathedral with buckets of water to put out fires, and who rebuilt their lives choosing to keep pushing hope, did so because there was little other option. At our core, we want to keep straining away for more life.

The light turned green in Trafalgar Square, and everyone around us started crossing the street, making it natural for her and I to do likewise. We were on our separate ways again.

Most creative people will often say that they want to give up their profession for something more sensible. All armature dramatics aside, I often find myself debating on whether my career as an actress and writer will ever really be worthwhile. This is especially the case if you know you can do something with your life—anything in fact—you set your mind to. At my age, I am still young enough to go to law school or do a plethora of other things if I set my mind to them. I am often reminded that God tells us to wait and to trust him, which is a combination that contains two of the hardest things for me to do in my life. The combination is excruciating, and it seems that if I took things into my own control, everything would and should happen much faster.

Last week I found myself having such a day. With the assortment of facebook, twitter, and other necessities of the modern age, I am able to share in my friends milestones and see the lovely pictures that show up as a result—the weddings, the births, the job promotions—none of which have shown up in my life as of yet, and in many ways, I feel that my road stretches on and on before me without a single bend in it or any sign to act as a marker for how far I’ve come or how far I have yet to go. Still waiting for so much that I want to accomplish, often overshadows the massive amount that I already have.

When you first meet Jeremy you aren’t quite sure if he is an actual person or a character attempting to be a human being. He was a guest teacher in one of my acting classes last week—he creates the figure of a sort of man-clown, who dresses in a green hat and vest with a suit coat and a handkerchief. The sort of outfits that people used to wear all the time, but now when the entire ensemble is put together, looks vaguely comical. He goes about the country teaching that to create anything one must be willing to take risks. The risk of failure and then come to the realization that there is security in failing, especially when one hits rock bottom—for then there is then no where else to go, which can be any more diminutive and where the ground offers no padding but plenty of support. After a brief lecture, he took off his hat which in the style of David Larible, seemed to have a mind and style of a movie all its own. His hat came alive rolling across his shoulder, beckoning from the floor to pay attention to him, and finally in a brief moment of risk itself through it into us the class and challenged us to make it land on his single finger as he stood on a chair. I was not amused and for that matter neither was the rest of the class walking around the room which seems to be a favored activity among any and all acting teachers, was something that I found exhausting on that particular day. I didn’t want to train anymore perhaps if I did train to be an actor nothing would become of it. So, while the rest of the class attempted in vain to land the mysterious and seemingly rebellious hat on Jeremy’s finger I meandered around—not wanting to perform in the least. He rest of the class soon got fed up with the game and began tossing the hat back and forth to each other as much as attempting to take aim at the target.

Perhaps now is an appropriate time to say that I can’t throw anything. My aim is terrible and more often then not I am unable to let go of the object that I’m attempting to toss, so it falls to the floor. Even my dog knows this fact and when we attempt to play fetch together, he picks up the ball and throws it himself after my vain attempt to create some distance from the object has failed. Then after throwing it himself, he retrieves the ball and hands it over to me so that I may have another try. When I used to play competitive basketball, I was known as a “defensive player.” If ever I was in possession of the ball, one could be assured that something was completely wrong.

As the girls tossed the hat back and forth, I found not a familiar face in the entire class this being are very first time of meeting together. Whenever I am in the company of strangers I feel, compelled to justify my existence—to illustrate that I am every bit as capable in achieving my goals and keeping up with the best of them—but the need to justify oneself never leads to creativity. One of these strange and unknown students eventually tossed the hat to me and I quickly began to belittle myself. How nice I thought to myself, they wanted to attempt to include the crippled girl. I knew that attempting to land the hat on my teacher’s finger was completely out of the question, and so without thinking, I simply tossed it aside.

As I watched to see just how measly my throw had been, I saw the hat land squarely on the target.

By the time I got home that evening the shock of it still had not managed to wear off. It was an unbelievable and in many was inexplicable experience. Despite all this, it offered me encouragement. As cliché as this perhaps is to say, it is often when we take one small step backwards from our dreams to truly examine what we want and how far we are willing to go for it—one step away to attempt to gain some distance and perspective—it is then that we are able to perform are best. It is in taking this step in the seemingly wrong direction that we release ourselves from trying to justify ourselves and set free the creative forces, which are ultimately uncontrollable.

On that particular day, reaching my target in the little sense allowed me to reach for my dreams in the metaphorical sense. After all, the hat with my deficiency in aim and leverage could have landed anywhere in the room, and even though I was not thinking of it, it dropped off exactly where it needed to be.

By the time I put her on the plane, I had no idea how I was going to survive without my friend. A s.n.a.f.u at immigration put a friend who came to visit me on holiday back in the US for another six weeks. Thus all my plans for companionship, a friend to lend an extra hand, and not having to come home to an empty house, were thwarted.

At the same time, my long time assistant was moving out, leaving me very little time to find someone new to cook, clean, feed me my meals, and help with other minor but much needed tasks. Then, in a moment of divine irony, an email came through my inbox with the subject heading “What feeds you?” The gods were laughing.

The most difficult thing about my disability is that, even well into adulthood, I cannot make a meal or feed it to myself. All other aspects of life in a wheelchair I’ve just about been able to wrap my head around. I wear shoes which I never have to tie, I get my hair washed by a salon, I’m even quite good at flirting in pubs so I can get guys to help me walk down the stairs to visit the toilets. But all of this requires calories to burn, which in turn requires the intake of food, which is one area of my life that I have zero control over. Having to depend on others for food is like a country having to depend on OPEC for energy, sooner or later everyone else has you over a barrel.

I once heard a homeless woman being interviewed remark that the hardest thing about being in her position was not knowing where her next meal was coming from. Although I am far from being homeless, I know exactly how terrifying that feels. It is a kind of poverty which is not dictated by the wallet or by some stockpile of faith. At least three times a week there comes a point where I have no idea when or how I’m going to eat again and unless I’m willing to put some pieces together, I have no idea how that can possibly change. My last meal could quite possibly be exactly what it sounds like.

There’s about as many differing definitions for the word poverty as there are organizations set up to work towards its end. In my flat in London I’ve never dared to think of myself as being impoverished. But, after my curiosity being peaked and doing a little research, I realized that every single one of these definitions mentioned a lack of what is essential for survival. Does the fact that I have gone multiple days without food put me on the edge of the poverty line, even while I sit in a riverside flat trying to figure out the next alternative for food? Or perhaps this simply makes me a bad planner.

No parent wants his children to grow up not knowing where their next meal is coming from. For that matter no parent wants to see his child lack in anything. If the certainty of a next meal is the minimum standard for successful parenting, then my mother and father failed miserably. And yet the wealth of what they could give me allows me to survive in a world where nothing is guaranteed, even my next meal.

If poverty, as some organizations such as the UN defines it, is simply the lacking of a necessity in life, then we are all impoverished in one form or another. And in many cases it is the “wealthiest” amongst us who are actually the most impoverished. The myth of an independent and self sufficient life, reflected in even these definitions of poverty, not only perpetuates a misconception but also actively pulls us away from relationships of interdependence. If we are loved, we may not know where the next meal is coming from, but we do know those around us will not let us starve. Someone will notice, someone will help, provided we are willing to show our blatant vulnerability freely, and admit we are all lacking in something which is needed to survive this difficult task called living.

Looking back to the times I’ve been without food, without help, temporarily impoverished as it were, much of it has been due to my own stubbornness and unwillingness to admit to my own need. I am not saying that doing so would wipe out poverty or all hungry people would have their problems solved if they simply admitted they needed help. My disability does not go away simply because I have the assistance I need. The fact I am being fed does not negate the fact I cannot feed myself anymore than the fact a homeless man has a bed for the night negate the fact that he is, indeed, homeless. But we are lying to ourselves if we do not admit that each of us are in need of something which makes life livable.

I cannot feed myself and that’s awful. More days than I care to count I’ve spent vast stores of energy trying to figure out where my next meal is coming from. By some standards this would label me as being ‘impoverished.’ But it is what we lack as well as our excesses which make us interact and inspire life into each other when no other solution would allow us to maintain momentum. I am unable to eat on my own and the solution to this problem means I have a wealth of dinner dates and friends to meet for coffee who tell me that I feed them as much as they feed me. Usually I do a pretty good job lining up these appointments 3 times a day to ensure I do not go hungry. On the days that this fails, I am forced to admit my weakness rather than letting it be implicit. I am forced to call someone and say “I need help.” And I am forced to admit that with the number of people who love me enough to come to my aide, I am far from being impoverished.