Never Walked In High Heels

I have learned in recent years that there are many hazards of not having a diamond ring. However, this was one that I never expected.

I was in a coffee shop the other day when a young man asked if he could sit next to me. Instantly suspicious, I stupidly nodded even though my past judgment has told me that individuals who wish to sit next to me usually want to talk to me, and such individuals who want to talk to me usually prevent me at the very least from getting my work done. However, this particular man illustrated that not only would he hold me back from work, but I would proceed to a conversation which even my best etiquette teachers would be at an absolute loss to navigate. The young man proceeded to tell me his name and states that he has been abducted to the planet Zorbon, and what I am actually seeing is his hologram android.

At first I think, he must be joking in order to seem more bizarre than he actually is, and then he proceeds to tell me that he is serious, using his laptop to pull up star charts, databases, and other information regarding the great planet of Zorbon which, forgive me if I’m mistaken, seems as if no one on earth has ever heard of.

This of course is not the first time I have found myself in a conversation which made me question whether or not I had slipped into an alternate universe. I seem to attract weirdos from every tribe, nation, and planet. This is a gene I am convinced that I have inherited from my father. My father has the remarkable ability to attract cult leaders, religious fanatics and shall we say, oddities of all sorts. Evidently during their early dating lives, these convergent flocks would hound my mother and father; making it impossible for them to go on a simple date. So I seem to have inherited this gene and although it seems to be recessive in most people, I have a pheromone that somehow attracts very bizarre people.

On the whole, I think that I am pretty tolerant of different individuals’ world views. My own views are fierce in their own right, which may be as strange to some as hailing from Zorbon. Among my friends, there are many Jews, Catholics, Hindu’s, Muslims, basically an entire diversified population which would make the BBC diversity department howl with envy. However, there is only so much a woman can take and being introduced to a hologram android is pushing the limits. The only appropriate response I could garner was, “Buddy, you’re bloody insane.”

I’m not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe being from the planet Zorbon is supposed to be particularly sexy. Perhaps in the style of, I’ll let you see my hologram if you let me see yours. But in my book, this is not a particularly pleasant way to start a romance let alone a conversation.

I have often been told in my life to be kind and tolerant to everyone and to love them exactly as they are, giving every guy a chance before I reject him as a potential suitor. These days, coffee shops are the place to meet your soulmate; and so I do my best to smile and look inviting, even when I’m only there to get a little work done. I don’t know if these rules of dating extend to people who have been abducted and replaced by androids, but after about fifteen minutes of supposed conversation, I found it best to take my work and make an exit.

I am unable to wash my hair, there is way too much of it for me to handle. When I went away to college, the major worry of my parents was not that I wouldn’t be able to keep my grades high or wouldn’t have the self-discipline to attend class, no; it was the daily task of taking care of my hair and other minute personal details. At one point I even seriously debated on shaving my head and wearing a wig at all times. However, whenever I visited a wig shop I realized that nobody else’s hair, natural or synthetic, no matter how easy it was to take care of, would ever be my own. For me, I always thought of my hair as my signature. Some women get into shoes, other women handbags. Mine was like Sampson; my hair, a symbol of strength and health; regardless of it throwing me into utter dependence.

It was either fate or providence that when I moved away to college, there was a hair salon directly across the street that was having their grand opening that first week. For four years I visited those hair dressers, talking about my problems and my potential love interests as they washed my hair and pinned it in such a way that it inevitably looked lovely, but also stayed out of my face. And then a week after I graduated, the owner declared bankruptcy and the studio closed.

At university there was a stark contrast between the students and professors always insisting on reading and having intellectual debates and those in any sort of vocational industry. It often turned into outright snobbery. And while the turnover rate of the people employed by a single salon is shockingly high. Often at my own school, people would think that the cosmetologists or other individuals who insisted on going into vocational school rather than receiving a full liberal arts degree were somehow inferior. They couldn’t stick to a single curriculum, they were fickle, gave up easily and that’s why their lives lead them to cosmetology school rather than a prestigious intellectual education such as our own.

Here’s what elitists like liberal arts students miss, and it’s taken me several years, as well as another salon I love equally to bring me to this conclusion. The services of hairdressers and cosmetologists changes as many lives and helps as many people during a time of need as any doctor or psychiatrist. My quality of life is literally improved by individuals who insist that I am taken care of and go out in public in my best possible style.

Many hairdressers and cosmetologists actually spend their weekends in funeral homes attempting to present the dead in a state of great beauty during funeral processions. It’s so that those in mourning can look at the faces of their loved ones now gone and have a permanent final memory of them looking peaceful, serene, and beautiful. Another hairdresser in London spends her Saturdays working with individuals going through chemotherapy; fitting wigs and trimming them into a style that suits each individual patient so that they will not be saddled with embarrassment regarding their hair loss. And as for me, the ability to have my hair out of my face whenever I want, is priceless, as I would otherwise be miserably fighting the constant battle of keeping hair out of my eyes. It also means with an up-do, people take me seriously as a professional, because with my hair up in a bun or braid, I no longer look like I am twelve years old or mentally incompetent. Therefore, strangers actually treat me with more respect, directness when I have my hair styled in a way that flatters me.

Its easy to dismiss the beauty industry and those in it as encouraging vanity. A kind of reverse arrogance sets in assuming that either those involved are also shallow and self serving. But beauty has its value and serves a purpose, that is: to teach us all we are to be valued, not only for how we look, be who we are and what we can do for others as well.

What is it about watching a movie or seeing a play or reading a book where the story is completely new? There are archetypes, there always are, but on the whole, you don’t know what’s going to happen or how it’s going to end. It’s in these situations that the characters, I believe, are so unexpected they almost seem like real people and you get emotionally involved and invested until the credits roll and the last page turns.

Such stories are unique and becoming increasingly rare. Recently I went to a conference at BAFTA and they started spurting out the three act formulas and inciting incidents and lists of rules every story must have in order to fit the mold of a “good story.” It’s nothing new of course; Aristotle did the same thing thousands of years ago and his outline for what a “good story” needs to have hasn’t changed much, despite the plethora of books and essays written about the “good story.” It doesn’t matter what sort of media it is and how you interact with the story; the element’s are always there.

But when I sat through this two day long conference at BAFTA literally breaking down the moments piece by piece and wondering what they need to have, I began to get very bored. A good story doesn’t necessarily just have the basic elements; like anything else in life the elements have to create some sort of harmony where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You don’t taste the individual ingredients that go into a cake; you taste the entire cake. So it must be for a story. If you were to say that the climax is most certainly the climax, you’re suddenly ripped out of the world of the story and placed back into the classroom or worse, a science laboratory, which is never a good place to be.

What makes a new story great is that like life, you have no idea where it’s going and how it’s going to end. The level of tension in the defining moments build and build until you literally squirm in your seat. It’s a physical reaction as well as an emotional one which forces you to stay in the world of the story. Actually, this is what life is supposed to be. We don’t walk around saying “This individual didn’t have a father, therefore these psychological characteristics must create personality.”

Our lives are nothing if they are not first stories; and a good story, while you may not know where it goes and what roads it will take you down, still makes you feel like you are in good hands. Likewise in life the authors of the story, whether they be ourselves or something out there in the cosmos, must also give us some element of support and confidence that in the end it will work out for the best one way or another. And so looking backwards at our lives when we get to see our stories and the elements that builds off of each other to create ourselves today. We are an essence, a piece of artwork that takes years of creation in order to flourish and is constantly evolving.

An old teacher of mine once gave me some advice which I think was meant to guide my writing; instead it ended up guiding my life. On a piece of paper he wrote: “Spin life into a verse.”  It took me a while but I think he wanted me to make my life my own story. What he meant was I was to be understanding the elements and the building blocks individually and being grateful for where they landed. But as a whole, seeing life and living it as an irreplaceable and unrepeatable which is unique in itself. In this way, when I look at an original story of fiction, I cannot help but see myself and the one great story that is the story of us as an entire world within it.

It was late at night when I finally began to think about suffering. The lights were going out and I was sitting in my favorite spot in the flat looking at the river Thames go by. On the staircase I thought “nobody likes to suffer.” Earlier that week there had been flashing lights and sirens on the bridge that crosses an area of our local quay. The road was blocked off for hours, and we had to go the long way around the neighborhood in order to visit our local supermarket and shopping centre. After it was finally cleared away, four bouquets of flowers had been tied to posts of the barricade which prevents people from falling into the river. An eleven year old boy had jumped in on a hot summers day and on the way down, hit his head against the wall causing him to lose consciousness. It took two hours for emergency crew to find his body.

A friend of mine, when he reported this to me, kept saying over and over “We told those kids not to play there; not to jump in.” I could see the frustration that comes with age and understanding dangers that children remain ignorant to or choose to ignore. I don’t think he would be as upset if a seventeen year old had done the same thing, but an eleven year old. My friend was visibly frustrated.

If you live long enough, you will be miserable. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how protected your life is. It’s a fact of the human condition; you will suffer. And you will be tested in how much you are determined that life is worth living. The alternative is that you die young, as the case of our neighbor boy. In that case you inevitably make a bunch of other people miserable and such is the depressing side of the circle of life. We love; we grow attached to people, things, ideas, places, and they are inevitably taken away and we are given the choice to clutch on thereby suffocating ourselves and the people around or let go thereby accepting the pain, accepting change and forcing ourselves to never have any stability at all.

A book I was reading not too long ago explained that a sociologist interviewed the victims who’d survived the Jewish concentration camps of the second World War to ask what effect the experience had on their faith. The findings were shocking:

“During the 1970’s, a man named Reeve Robert Brenner surveyed 1000 survivors of the Holocaust, enquiring especially about their religious faith.

How had the experience of the Holocaust effected their beliefs about God? Somewhat astonishingly almost half claimed that the Holocaust had no effect on their beliefs about God. But the other half told a different story. Of the total number surveyed, 11 percent said they had rejected all belief in the existence of God as a direct result of their experience. After the war, they never regained faith. Analyzing their detailed responses, Brenner noted that their professed atheism seemed less a matter of theological belief and more of an emotional reaction, an expression of deep hurt and anger against God for abandoning them” (From: Where is God When it Hurts by Phillip Yancey)

Suffering in any form forces us to reevaluate our ideas about the bedrock of what we base our life on. The eleven percent of people who became atheists as a result of their experience, it means taking a good long hard look at one’s own religion, turning around, and walking away. For others it means undergoing that same examination of one’s beliefs and deciding if they are worth keeping, need to be re-edited, or need to be thrown out entirely. Assuming that there is a God out there, many of us, think that it must be pretty easy being in control of the entire universe. One can look at the Old Testament as well as the Torah and characters such as Moses and Abraham who believed in an absolute God with an enormous personality. As individuals who said to their creator, “Sure it’s easy being up there, why don’t you come down here for a bit and try it out huh?”

As humans, when we think about God, we are torn between two dichotomies. The first is we want Him to suffer. We want him to know how difficult life is if He is out there, and do everything He can to improve it. But the irony of it is, if there is a God. Do we have any room in our human ideology for a God that willingly sacrifices and goes through agony? We can’t stand the idea of a God who lives above us oblivious to the concept of human pain and suffering, and yet the idea that an all powerful being that would willingly submit himself to such agony and pain completely out of love is outside our concept of what God is. We have no classification for a God who feels pain by choice. Perhaps it’s a contradiction of terms, someone who is almighty and chooses the difficult way.

I think about the family of the little boy who jumped into the water two weeks ago, how much suffering they must be going through now. The truth is not only do I hate it; I get every bit as angry as my friend. A child didn’t live long enough to suffer, and ironically, that’s what angers us all. The fact is that his life was cut short on a whim. Now his family is left picking up the pieces, asking the questions which inevitably come from suffering and searching for answers.

In this way, the child is very much like our preconception of God. We want every child to live long enough to know what suffering is and to ask questions about life himself rather than asking them in the wake of a child’s death. But ironically, like everyone else, we know that it would be much simpler if neither God, nor the child, nor anyone else had to suffer in the first place.

As a performer I often have to force myself to watch things that are immensely popular despite the fact that I hate them. I am at home today watching the entire first season of Glee; and truth be told, I can’t stand it. To me all I can see is a bunch of teenagers encouraging America to continue with bad theatre and poor acting habits. So many amateur thespians in America think that the apex of acting comes when you can smile big and sing loudly on cue, which only perpetuates those poor habits and generally bad theatre.

As I am watching, one of the teachers said to the students “Adults have to make difficult choices.” The tone in which he says it is pejorative at best. Adults have to make difficult choices? What about high schoolers? Don’t they have difficult decisions. When I was in high school, I was never able to have the world revolve around who I was interested in dating or what the cheerleaders were doing that Saturday night. A typical day in high school consisted of me putting on a three-piece suit and carrying a suitcase; worrying about making grades that were high enough that I wouldn’t be sent back into special education classes due to an over-controlling teacher who insisted that all students with disabilities be taught solely by her. Every “B” I received on an exam was a sign for red alert; and often I chose between sleep I needed to make it to the next day and putting in that extra four hours on an English paper when I was only able to type at an alarmingly slow rate. Teachers supported me, and often ran interference between myself and my school administration. Sometimes even putting themselves at risk. These are the things I remember from my high school experience.

I listen to older American women who often say of their years before college “Those were the happiest years of my life.” Really? At seventeen? All their dreams came true when they were the lead in the high school musical and they dated the captain of the football team? Looking at my yearbooks this weekend, I noticed that someone wrote “Don’t worry, it has to get better than this.” Surely that friend of mine had more wisdom than the ones who said the period between the years of fourteen and eighteen are the most precious. What about the birth of your first child or your wedding day? The time when you realized that your family is remarkable; or having your own kids graduate from high school after years of struggling with dyslexia? That outshines being fifteen, having acne, and wondering if anybody will ask you to the prom.

Due to modern technology, I am able to keep up from a controlled distance with several “friends” from high school. I wouldn’t consider them friends that I have a relationship with now, but the magic of the internet means that I can look at what their careers are, pictures of their first baby, and engagements. Overall I’m glad that my dreams didn’t come true in high school. Now these friends of mine are working for insurance companies and shuffling off to law school when at seventeen, all they wanted to be was actors and make the world a better place. I’m sure in their own way they have come to the conclusion that they are doing just that. But for someone who did have a great deal of trouble in high school, I must say difficult years early on make one much more confident and excited about the dreams that are to come.

He always bows at me as I go by him in my electric wheelchair. He is a man, one of many, who sells the “Big Issue” on the same street corner day after day. He interacts with everyone who walks by him, trying to look them in the eye and smile; often, he is able to get them to smile as well. More often than not, however, people do their best to ignore him; even changing directions to be out of his reach. His hair is longer and he has a beard the color of maple syrup as well as a jacket that says in big letters on the back “God Loves You.” In fact, in many ways it’s hard not to look at him and think of the old Sunday school pictures of Jesus with milky eyes, long hair and a beard; wanting to tell everyone that God loves each of them. It looks as if, except for the complacent eyes, this Big Issue seller could have modeled for any of those paintings from my early church days.

After nine months of driving past him, looking at my watch, sometimes managing a smile, but trying to avoid him all the same, I realized that I was being absurd. Here is an individual I saw everyday who always tried to make me smile and even more amusingly; always treated me like a queen by bowing whenever he saw me. So I stopped one morning when I could spare the time.

“This is absurd, I see you every day and I don’t know your name; what is it?”

“I’m Brian, what’s yours?”

And so, for a while, we chatted briefly, promising to call each other by name the next time our paths met (or rather I traveled down his path, depending on how you look at it).

Knowing Brian as a man named Brian, and knowing that he knows my name somehow makes the city of London seem instantly smaller. I can wave at him from across the street, or he can whistle and shout my name to get my attention. And because he looks so much like Jesus and insists that God loves everyone in this city, a city where the definition of love has been forgotten. It’s impossible not to make the connection between him and a life of faith.

Christ himself said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” in one of the most confusing texts ever written. The Beatitudes managed to tie any person regardless of religion and background in knots. At first it sounds like this man is handing out consolation prizes, “Well, you don’t get to be rich but at least you get to be blessed.” This is where some of our adamant anger against faith lies. A blessing is a lousy consolation prize when someone is starving. But what Brian illustrates is a world that we all dream of, where everyone knows everybody else’s name. Not just name, but everyone knows everyone else and can recognize the value and talents of each individual. The thought that this could ever happen in a city like London is enough to cause apoplectic fits. \Being known is much more intimate. Most of us, when we walk by Big Issue sellers or people sleeping on the street, do not directly disrespect them. But the automatic response of the diverting of eyes and the insistence of continuing walking when confronted with such individuals is ultimately the refusal to know these people and the conditions and events that have shaped them.

All of us enjoy being with people who know us, not just our names, but our likes and dislikes, qualities and characteristics, even when that other person is able to finish your sentence for you. There is a sort of relief when anyone passes a friend on the street and they stop you by name. Inevitably, it sets the rest of your day on an ecstatic level, as you recall the brief, but solid encounter of a friend chasing you down the street calling your name for everyone to hear. What we all want is a world in which people connect with us, serve each other, and recognize the need that every individual has and how he or she can help fulfill those needs. The relief comes when you know a persons name and can communicate about yourselves with each other, even if , it is a simple wave across the street.

It was as if he would panic and the world would stop. My friend would constantly worry about everything to the point that he would find it difficult to breathe and the plans we had for that evening were inevitably discarded. Constantly, he was obsessed about his health, about his bank account, about what would happen to him in the future. Every single cough he had was a sign of pneumonia. Every purchase at the store was draining his bank account and every missed opportunity that he felt he rightly deserved was just another symptom of the world oppressing him so that he was convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had no future. I’m not speaking about anxiety attacks. While most people learn to control them, they are inexplicably horrible and a documented medical condition which has puzzled scientists and led doctors to take constant action; prescribing medication to correct such a health issue. Panic attacks are certainly not to be dismissed. But my friend was a person who constantly had anxiety in the form of worry and ultimately it developed into a severe form of narcissism. I never put the words narcissistic and worry together. To me they always seemed to complete opposites. After all, a narcissist thinks he can do no wrong, so why would he worry? But if you think about it, worry is the narcissistic insistence that life goes your way, that troubles don’t come because you shouldn’t have to handle them and that if they do come, such trouble ought to be brought to a swift and immediate end as quickly and with the least amount of inconvenience as possible. Constant worry means that the world must operate within your frame of perception; and there is not room in life for any sort of deviation.

As if this wasn’t enough, worry has to spread. One rarely keeps his worries to himself, instead expressing them with the hope of burdening others and invoking sympathy is a common activity for those who insist on worrying about everything. The listener therefore either begins to worry about the same thing or worries about the friend. Therefore, more burdens are introduced into the relationship. It’s like importing troubles to another mans conscience when all of those troubles ultimately serve you.

And as a result, in the case of my friend and I at least, it killed our relationship. My plans were constantly put on hold due to his anxiety attacks and consistent insistence that we stay home because he was worried about what might happen if we were to go into the outside world. Worry ultimately shrinks the safety zone in which anyone is able to operate. It kills life, limiting the deeds that we can accomplish without fear and the useless attempt of self-preservation. If someone constantly and without good reason is worrying that he might someday be hit by a car, he will first avoid busy streets and intersections, only operating on side roads, and then ultimately only operating on roads that are rarely visited by any form of vehicle until finally he is unable to be on a road at all. Fearing even the sidewalks. His world shrinks, and thus he limits himself and the immense joy that comes with experiencing a full and risk inherent life.

Worry is, of course, natural within all of us. When I first moved to London, I was one of those individuals that would worry about everything. All of a sudden I had graduated college and I was 22 meeting a metropolis on my own for the very first time. The pit of worry in my stomach was constantly deepening. A good friend pointed out that, while worry is natural, it comes with the realization that we are taking part in a tiny corner of the world But then he said something else. In his letter to me he added “But don’t worry, you were supporting the world long before you were ever aware of it?” Worry is a form of narcissism specifically because it puts you at the center of the universe rather than letting the universe unfold naturally and through the winding roads of life, finding your appropriate place within it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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