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.

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.

Living with a disability is the equivalent of being trapped inside the riddle about a dog, a duck, and a bag of grain. Which all need to cross the river? You can’t leave the duck alone with the grain because the duck will eat the grain. You can’t leave the dog with the duck because the dog will eat the duck. Yet somehow you have to manage to take a rowboat and get all three across.

It was on a day when my life was turning out to be the epitome of this riddle when my mother exploded at me “You need to learn to avoid problems at all possible costs! Why can’t you keep things as simple as humanly possible?” The irony of it was I actually do my best to accomplish just that, but I am somehow extremely unsuccessful at it. When you are trying to navigate through a world which is built for people on two functioning legs and with two functioning hands, the idea of avoiding problems leads you little further than coming out your front door. If you want to avoid the challenges of the world, that is staying inside where it’s safe. If you want to live life to the fullest, you better be prepared for some sort of “choose your own adventure” story with lots of opportunities to see the “Game Over” screen.

I used to think that life was actually about avoiding problems at all possible costs, making the right decisions that would lead to the path of least resistance and easy sailing. But you can’t avoid problems. There is no fairy godmother that can swoop in and make everything OK. Living was only in the confines of a highly accessible house and being certain that all the problems in the world will not come to get you will lead to a highly boring life. It’s the old dilemma of Siddartha, the Buddhist prince who had everything he wanted and yet lacked fulfillment in the world. I’m not sure when my mother said I needed to avoid problems, she meant it to its fullest extent possible. Because avoiding problems means on some level that there are real solutions to every dilemma we face, which can be attained. Some issues are so complicated that they are, on a certain level, unsolvable. The best thing we can do is simply work our way through them.

Life only works when its constantly expanding in every direction. This doesn’t simply mean finding creative solutions to the problems that we encounter, or incorporating some sort of community spirit through living. t means that the problems, the sorrows, the bruises, these too are a part of life and worth working through and worth living for. Even this sorrow, which none of us want to encounter, must be faced fully in order for a life to even begin to have the depth possible and necessary to be rich and full of vibrancy. In return, these problems we encounter and sorrows we must mourn present us with a new challenge. We can either close our hearts and become callous, refusing to go anywhere that hasn’t been protected by some emotional health and safety policy. Or we can take it, all of us that is, for what it ,d recognize that to love it all and to live it all is to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, risking failure heartbreak and the entire boat tipping over losing the entire dock and the bag of grain. But in the end, we live in a world where trading vulnerability and safety inevitably stops not only problems, but living, dead in it’s tracks.

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.

Last week, while I was on holiday, Never Walked in High Heels finished its first year of publication. A year ago, a friend said that he read some basic rules for starting an electronic publication and they all recommended the same thing: patience.

I always have thought myself to be a very patient person until about a year ago. Due to my disability, I’m always last in line, waiting for doors to be unlocked, and dealing with my own slowness in daily tasks. If anyone was going to be impatient it was never going to be me. And then I became a working professional. And, if that wasn’t enough, I was working in a world that wasn’t used to seeing people like me work. To top it all off: I’m working in the arts.

Here’s the thing they never tell you during those inspirational movies about crusaders who beat the odds and come out changing the world on the other side of their struggles, there was always a ton of waiting around. If the struggles themselves don’t get you, the waiting game surely will. Take a look at some all time favorites such as My Left Foot. It looks like all the sudden Christy Brown wakes up in the morning and decides to write ‘Mother’ on the kitchen floor. What you don’t see, is the ten years before, when Brown’s mother stared at him wondering what she did wrong, nor do you see the months of laborious and profoundly unclear dictating it took to write the books he’s so famous for. (You also don’t see him choking to death on a pork chop after supposedly being abused by his wife who may have been a lesbian… but hey, even Hollywood has its limits.)

Gandhi’s hunger strikes get condensed to a quarter of an hour. Helen Keller is saying “wa-wa” in the first scene. And William Wilberforce’s twenty years of fighting against the slave trade takes about two hours on film.

I remember once I asked a friend, who was an ex-cop, if crime shows were accurate. He laughed and said, “if they wanted to make it realistic, they’d have to add a lot more paper work and cups of coffee. Nobody would watch it.”

The truth is, I am impatient when it comes to myself, my dreams, and what I want to accomplish. And as I compare my readership this week to what I thought it would be a year ago, I am disappointed. And, if I allow it, I begin to let the waiting game beat me because I’m falling short of my own unreasonable expectations.

A year of Never Walked in High Heels means just under one hundred and fifty essays, two freelance assignments, and a steadily increasing readership. If anyone else accomplished this, I would have said “well done.” Somehow my biggest fault is to want to live in the future, rather than the here and now which will inevitably get cut in the edited version. So when I sit down tonight and, like a good little entrepreneur, sketch our my plan for the next year, I will have to have my roommate hide all the inspirational movies she can find.

The summer marks my forth year in London. I realized the other day that I have now spent longer being graduated from school than I have spent in my undergraduate education. And although I’m not exactly where I want to be, I like where I am.

The problem is the shift between living three years somewhere and four years is drastically different physiologically speaking. It’s like for the first few years out of college one is allowed to make whatever mistakes you can or be wherever in the world you want to be. And then the timer goes off with a ding and we are all supposed to come home and settle down, leaving our stories of adventure to tell the next generation. But as I get closer to the forth year milestone to pressure to come back to “the real world” increases. Adults who taught me growing up now call me to ask when I’m planning on coming home. And then they get upset when I tell the truth. That I don’t need to go home. For right now, I am home.

In the US, college is four years long for most people. After that, most people move to a drastically different life before coming into where we are going to actually be growing old and having a family. Its like that fourth mile marker signifies it’s too far away to turn around and come back home. And as I approach that point the questions become much more persistent… Athena, when are you coming home?

It’s taken me until now to actually realize this question does signify a certain rationality which everyone who is annoying me by asking this question is, ultimately aware of. It takes three years (as in full years) to settle into a place and make it yours. In the past year, I’ve notice a shift in my own life, my friends call me up to see how an audition went, or arrange for informal picnics where we used to have stilted and even semi-rehearsed coffee dates. We don’t notice who brought the last tickets or cup of tea. My friends here know that I am not going anywhere for a while (barring a fabulous opportunity… everyone knows I’m not settled down that much). The friend who lives in the red Dutch barge in the opposite quay and I are already making plans for our Christmas Cakes.

This is where my life is right now. It consists of understanding art and acting as well as boats and tides. It means waiting all week in patient expectation to bake with the women who live in the quays and learn how to weigh flour on an eighty year old scale given to her by her grandmother, while my American measuring cup sit uselessly in my kitchen. I get to listen to actors debate about Mamet and offer my opinion over Turkish coffee in our local pub run buy the old man from Ephesus who swears he’s in love with me. And no, while I was getting my degree and sitting with my hand raised and my ankles crossed, this was never where I envisioned my life being.

But now I’m here, I see no reason to go back.

When I told my mom that I would never go back to the UK, she immediately said I would. As I’m on a boat going home, curving around the Thames, those five years seemed to have never happened. A lifetime has passed and I am doing exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.

The first time I was in London, I constantly felt as though I was drowning. Going deeper and deeper it was clear that I was not in charge. My assistants were, and I would never be able to take the reigns away from them. From before we even left home in Chicago, the tensions were clear, and as we crossed passport control, I kept saying to myself over and over, “tomorrow I’ll wake up and everything will be better. Everything will be as it should be.” That summer we would spend three months based in England but also going to various places in Europe as I was completing my research for a thesis. My memories of those that time can be best summed up in two words: fear and hunger. Outside of that I don’t remember going to the Eifel Tower, or the first time I saw Big Ben. I don’t particularly remember the Swiss Alps or being in a bathhouse in Budapest. Fear because one of the assistants was constantly threatening that my chair would go into the river if things didn’t go his way. And since every major European city has a river, it was a constant danger. And hunger, because the assistants saw the fact that I needed help getting food as a way to maintain a level of control. Sometimes it wasn’t ok to eat anything. When they felt like it, it was, but the food was minimal.

How I ever got a combination between these two assistants, I don’t know, but after I had returned from my journey, several people commented that they knew these individuals better than I did and they immediately thought of it as a bad idea. Why didn’t they say anything before? I will never know. But before I left people encouraged me that these two would be good at keeping a schedule and help me with research. We did indeed keep our complex schedule keeping interviews and seeing resources at an alarming rate. By the end of the summer we had been in no less than 12 countries, and it had all gone exactly as I planned back at the university when I was setting up logistics. It was just that none of it felt the way I had planned it to feel. Several times my assistants told me that I should never leave the United States again because it was so difficult for me to travel and they had to do so much of the work. Six months later I finally had a doctor tell me that what I was facing during that summer was abuse.

When the psychiatrist gave me a diagnosis, I immediately asked if he was sure. “I thought that’s what they gave war veterans after being in horrific situations. I’ve been in nothing of the kind. Just a trip to Europe that didn’t go the way I thought it ought to.” He said to me, “But you were in a horrific situation.” It would take me several years to realize that he was right, that my once insulated world was shattered. It was almost as if I had a demarcation between childhood and adult life. And sometimes, despite the amount of grace for forgiveness I have sought, and successfully obtained, I still wish I could go back to before that world was shattered.

So, at home, I swore to my family I would never return to the UK. Without thinking, my mother made her response.

The promises we make ourselves when we are in pain are some of the most dangerous oaths we can ever commit to. These promises inevitably shut down our world and shrink life. On one level it makes sense. We are hurting. And who does not cower in the closet when they know there is a monster outside that is two big for them? Mom knew that my oath was quite literally taking the world and shrinking it down to places I would go and places I would not go. When I called her up exactly nine months later telling her that I had gotten an internship that I could not pass up, and I was excited to be moving back to the UK, she wasn’t surprised in the least. Sooner or later she always knew that I would find the strength somehow to re-open what I had locked away and refused to explore.

The boat culls around Canary Wharf and is headed towards home. The geometric skyline looks completely mythical and fierce in its proportions compared to the rest of London. I am lucky that, despite my diagnosis, I don’t get many flashbacks, and when I do, I can usually control them. I am headed home and I can see my dock from Canary Wharf as the boat approaches. It’s a Tuesday night which means there is Quiz Night at the pub with people I know and trust. Tomorrow I have and audition followed by a concert with a friend at Saint Martins. It seems impossible that a city in which I felt so much terror could grow within three years to be my home and is now a place for joy.

And I shudder to think what would happen if I kept the promises I made to myself while I was in pain.

At what age can you disagree with people who used to be your elders?

During a recent conversation, I had to listen to a former tutor of mine essentially tell me how to run my life. He hadn’t seen me in three years and the difference between a 22 year old and a 25 year old is often striking- or at least I hope it is. Every argument he made, I knew as according to my own life, that factually he was wrong, but he didn’t want to hear about my successes. He only heard in his mind that I was a failure and needed to get out of the situation that I was currently in. Eventually, I intended to hang up on him, but decided this would be disrespectful. He was after all, a great mentor of mine and had helped create me as the woman I was—even though currently, that woman was highly irritated.

The problem with correcting your elders is that to them you’ll always be young. You’ll always be in need of their advice and mentorship, and they will always –numerically at least- have more life experience than you. As a kid I was constantly reminded to be respectful of my elders. Phrases such as “Don’t talk to him in that tone young lady” or “He’s done a lot for you. You might want to show a little gratitude once in a while,” continue to haunt me when I want to speak out against bad advice. So more often than not, even though I’m opinionated, I keep my mouth shut and try to let my superior come to his own conclusions.

But any relationship across generations, be it parent to child or student to teacher, changes as the younger individual grows up. It has to. If the adult doesn’t let the relationship change, it will be forever damaged, and if the younger doesn’t force the relationship to change he will be forever coddled by his mentor. Growing up across an intergenerational relationship can prove to be extremely difficult and damaging to both parties, but it has to be done. The switch between a vertical relationship (for example, teacher and child) to a horizontal relationship (such as peers) has to make that switch in order to still function.

But at some point during that switch from vertical to horizontal, you realize as you grow up that no adult has all the answers. In fact, many of them have just a few more than even you do. People make up their lives as they go, and that’s okay as long as they give you the freedom to do likewise. That moment where you realize that nobody knows everything, can be a combination of one of the most frightening but also liberating moments you will ever face. At that point, the world is truly yours, and we, regardless of age are all equal and trying to get by.

Older generations will always try to warn you against their mistakes, which is good, as well as fruitful because your mistakes should always be your own and if that means repeating the exact same ones that your parents created, at least make sure that you put your own special stamp of dysfunction on it. Don’t let people use you to fix their own past. What that is, is what I call a recycled life. People who didn’t succeed at living their lives for themselves that first time, and so they will try and make you live their lives now. And sometimes you may even have a revelation before one of your elders does, and that’s okay. If they are honest with themselves and with you, they will admit that they are still learning to grow up as well.

No man is ever made to live his life as he would wear a hand-me-down pair of shoes. It is not the role of anybody else to break in the seams and canvass of the pair of cross trainers, and then hand them back to you explaining what they are and are not capable of. That is your task, nobody else is permitted to unless you allow it.

What Sue realized and other therapists did not, is that even though I would never be a roller derby queen, there were things to be learned which roller-skating exemplified. Things like flexing one’s hips, finding core strength, regaining a center of gravity, and even the coordination it takes to bring one foot consistently in front of the other, all are skills which a pair of skates can challenge you to master more than being on your own two feet. Like football players taking ballet lessons to improve their game, Sue never expected me to become a great skater. And if I had become one, that point would be moot. What she was interested in is that I learned how to walk to the best of my ability. And if it took a pair of roller skates to learn that, then who was anyone to say that roller skating did not lend itself to a reasonable therapy goal?

Eventually I lost interest in the roller skates. I think I brought in a bike instead. And when I got my permit, Sue and a few other therapists took me out to learn to drive. Which is pretty impressive given that I came to the therapy centre with the expectation of never accomplishing the skills of speech and being able to sit up independently. It is the people who refuse to stop because hope may bring disappointment, refuse to believe that any dream is unreasonable, and strive for something which is deemed useless, who have the richest lives and greatest victories. The people who live life safely, refusing to reach beyond what is in easy grasp, have no claim on the lives of those that do.

After I was halfway through college, I went back to the therapy centre for a visit. Walking down the hall, I saw a small boy grasping desperately at the wall for balance. He was trying to move forward despite being attached to a set of roller skates. At a closer look, I saw they were the adjustable kind which attached to shoes. They bore the initials of the therapy clinic. Some therapist obviously thought they would be a good investment for teaching disabled children. The boy’s own therapist was encouraging him to move away from the wall. In answer to his protests and fears of falling she said “yeah, so what? Not like you haven’t fallen before.” I couldn’t help but smile.

Those who refuse to fall cannot learn to walk. They will look at a pair of brand new roller skates and never try them on. And eventually, they will do everything possible not to let a loved one fly.

The preceding is a narrative essay from Athena’s book The Perfect Sole due out this winter.

Hope is, by definition, something born out of adversity, slim chances, and unquenched desires. We do not hope that our loved ones will come home on time tonight when they’ve been on time every night for the past year. Unless there is a specific reason as to why tonight is different, we merely expect them to be on time. This is not hope. Hope does not come without the considerable risk of disappointment. Despite what any politician, inspirational speaker, or salesman may want you to believe, you cannot offer people hope without running the risk of them facing disappointment; the two will always go hand in hand.

Now there will be many who will respond  to this by claiming that there is a world of difference being giving hope for someone to obtain a reasonable goal and encouraging someone to reach for an unreasonable goal. In the upcoming weeks Sue was challenged with this statement plenty. In addition to roller skating being an unreasonable goal, it was deemed something even worse: not useful. After all. What possible use could I have for roller-skating? Wouldn’t my time be better spent learning to climb stairs or walking on gravel? Shouldn’t I be conquering something which would otherwise prove to be a hindrance in the real world?

This argument suddenly kept popping up more in my life when I decided to become an actor.  Was me being onstage really a reasonable goal? After all “you’re just so intelligent, performing seems like it would be such a waste. Have you thought about being a lawyer instead?”

But the argument of anything being a reasonable or even useful goal depends on the honest answer of a single question: according to who? Like anything else, is the judgment of a single person (or even a group) enough to make that declaration true? Someone may judge a dream unreasonable because they are unwilling to make the sacrifices it would take for it to come true. One man may deem it as a waste of resources simply because qualities such as intelligence, strength, and specific abilities are not his to offer or make use of.  But that doesn’t mean that a goal was ever unreachable. It simply means that that person was unwilling to do what it took to attain it. But one man’s limitations should never be placed on another, self imposed or otherwise.

At the age of four, just before I started working with Sue, my mother sat  in a meeting with my school’s administrators in which she was informed that I would never be encouraged to walk during school. Their justification was that encouraging me to walk was an unreasonable goal. Despite my mother’s protests and evidence to the contrary, none of the administrative experts or physical therapists would concede. Finally a student teacher raised her hand and said that she would give up her lunch hour to teach me skills I would need for walking. She never got to see me walk without the walker that she had to tape my hands to. She never saw me on roller-skates. But something told her those efforts were not wasted.

One wonders what the reaction would be if my mother had  brought in a pair of skates.