Never Walked In High Heels

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?

Last summer I saw two of my friends get married. In many ways it seemed as though they were already wedded long before they walked down the aisle and said their vows to each other. The second they went on their first date here in London it seemed that they were perfect for each other.

The woman was a friend of mine previously to the couple coming together. One afternoon she came into my flat insisting that over Valentine’s Day weekend, she would make haggis as a sort of rebellion against the overly commercial, sappy, syrupy, sociological dedication towards Valentine’s day. What could be a better rebellion than stuffing a sheep’s intestine full of herbs and spices while listening to punk music then tucking in to enjoy the hard work? So she did what any single, self respecting woman would do to prepare for Valentine’s day, she went to Borough Market and bought a sheep’s gut from the butcher’s. While there she bumped into a young man queuing up for the same ingredients. His version of the perfect Valentine’s day weekend was exactly the same as hers. Three years later they were walking down the aisle.

We were in a world which teaches that people are not fully complete until they have found a mate. This is not only a teaching of all the major religions, but also that of the mass media. Nearly every song one hears on the radio is about love. Every television show goes round and round about romantic interests, breakups, and the inevitable make up sex; as well as the news stories are filled with weddings and gossip about divorces. Romance, we are told, is one thing that everyone always ought to be looking for.

The idea of being a complete person and alone is almost unheard of. Churches and synagogues are full of singles groups where you can meet like-minded individuals of the opposite sex. Even in the modern world where marriage is not necessarily encouraged, it is difficult to be seen as a whole person. Everyone, at the very least, lives together as a couple.

What’s so amazing about my friend’s story is in many ways cliché. Over and over you hear, “It’s when you aren’t looking that you find someone,” and then we try to convince ourselves when we find someone that we are attracted to that we weren’t looking for anyone in the first place. I highly doubt that either of my friends were looking for their future mates when standing in line at a butcher shop, holding a sheep’s intestine. In many ways, that’s what makes their story so special. The fact that both of them, as individuals, were able to stand up to the and insist that a day which everyone else swears up and down was meant for love was actually meant for stuffing a sheep’s stomach and listening to of punk rock. There are two people completely content and confident with how they see themselves as well as refusing to cave in to the expectations of those around them hunting for happiness in another person simply because they are still single.

What makes an individual complete or a full entity is how satisfied they are with themselves, not how they are seen in the eyes of other people. If someone is without a partner, he must believe that he is still complete, not lacking in anybody’s expectation simply because there is no wife to show for it. Anyone who swears otherwise can, well, stuff it as they would a sheep’s gut. 

I’ve heard that everyone else knows this fact, however it was indeed news to me. Winston Churchill managed to lose every public election he ever ran in, ultimately of course he grew to be one of the greatest leaders of the UK in all of history. We hear stories of such great people failing over and over, falling flat on their face and at one time or another an object as simple as the lightbulb would never have come into reality, we sit in awe dumbfounded, and to be fair, never actually believing that such great men would be capable of such great and consistent failures. In our heart of hearts many of us say, “After a while of not getting what I was reaching for, I myself would give up.” This is a statement that I hear over and over as I pass over rejection slips in the mail or don’t get a callback that I feel I particularly deserved. The truth is, I can’t give up my dreams, nobody can. Such stories of great men refusing to give up on their’s only supports the drive. If I gave up I would always wonder, what if?

Often we forget the value of preparing, a willingness to be sharpened as tools, ready when we are called upon, for insisting on being prepared for when that day comes. Many years of work, when thankless and filled with little to no success, we forget that in our world that is driven purely on the basis of results and end gains, its that the preparation in many ways is more important than the achievement itself. The act of sharpening a knife over and over again, even when there are weeks or years when its use is not necessary insures that in the end our efforts will not be laid to waste, and in many ways, that preparation will prove more important than our willingness to cut.

Over and over I’ve heard within acting classes as well as when working on my own writing at home that creating works is a ratio of 10% inspiration and 90% luck. The timing of getting ready equals always sharpening those pencils and creating work that may or may not be called upon. So that when your day comes, you are the best tool possible in an industry that has a distinctive need. People tell me over and over that there will never be a use for an actor with a disability, but they forget that the world said the same thing about airplanes, actors of different races, female writers, about a million unforeseen occurrences, which ultimately had to have happened in order for progress not only to be made but also measurable. New needs arise when we are in desperate times or even when we are simply challenged by those days that are going well. Often times it takes years of failures for a person to be able to fulfill that new need exactly when it is needed. More importantly, it indeed takes decades of failures to be able to stand down an abysmal situation, such as a country at war or the night taking over one’s life, and therein refuse to back down from the challenge that seemed self-evident.

I think of these things often as I walk to various classes wondering if my investments in training and education will ever reap a dividend and even, quite possibly mean a profit, I work in an industry that in many ways doesn’t want change. Doesn’t want people to rock the boat, but in many ways this is of course, every industry. Arts and entertainment is no different in seeking stability than banking and law practice. Maybe the day when my vision of the world will be fulfilled will not come in my lifetime, but I know that the best things in the world are built on the backs of people failing and discovering that even amongst these failures there is a grit and determination that is more helpful than such minor successes along the way. The world was made better by those insisting that failure did not necessarily mean game over. These are the men I think of on my way to class day in and day out. I am reminded of them as I prepare for more exercises and move to face the new day, or as Abraham Lincoln (another man to never win a public election) said, “I will prepare, and someday my chance will come.”

Recently it was my birthday, and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly what I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted in our hearts. These imprints When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

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

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

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

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

On the one hand, you don’t know which of your dreams will come true or not. None of us ever do. But often the most earth shattering dreams are the ones which most people cannot see and therefore assume to be impossible.

One of my best friends called me in absolute tears the other day. Two of her younger sister’s, both unmarried, are now in their second trimester. Nobody else in the family was aware that they were pregnant until this week. Theirs is a Christian family devoted to rescuing children from troubled situations. Both my friend and her mother have actively devoted their professional careers to stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in separate ways. Her mother is an epidemiologist, my friend, a humanitarian worker that focuses on getting young women off the streets and out of prostitution, by showing them their value does not merely lie with their talents in bed. But for both of these women, their immediate reaction became a circumstantial symptom of abject failure.

Many families, particularly in more faith-based circles consider it embarrassing or even representative of a familial breakdown when a daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock. And it does evoke whispers among the people who surround that family, but it’s by no means the absolute worst thing that a child can do. Yet, the expectant grandparents often blush at how others will judge them rather than focusing their effort on creating the best family situation possible for the baby to come. I’m not saying that my friend’s family have fallen victim to this fallacy, but I have seen other families in the exact same situation do exactly that.

There is overall, a negative reaction within a family that bases its foundation in the Christian faith when an occurrence like this arises. There is a persistent fear amongst such people that the actions of their adult children somehow imply people are bad parents. Often I have seen parents threaten and even out right disown their children as well as their future grandchildren as the pregnancy in their eyes is the ultimate slap in the face to their child raising skills. Some of the most unchristian qualities actually come from those doing the disowning rather than those being disowned. However, what reflects worse on parenting skills in expecting grandparents refusing love to the expecting mother and child? Surely this is less of a Christian attitude than the act of getting pregnant ever was.

It is the unexpected events in life that cause us to drop our own masks of respectability. In truth, as a society, Christians today seem to care more about how other’s struggles can reflect poorly on them than what they can do to minimize struggling for any and all. When has it ever been morally responsible to even care about what the outside world thinks? Even in the most conservative families, public approval should never act as a barometer for actions or as a means to test what is morally right.

We all know somehow that there is a right and wrong, though we disagree on what exactly the nature of that division is, no one ever says, “I am going to go ahead and do the absolute wrong thing and make my life miserable as a result.” But the best among us sometimes set out to be the least controversial which creates almost a vacuum of morality. The fact that something makes waves doesn’t illustrate the fact that it is wrong and if someone disagrees or turns their nose up at your willingness to create a little trouble in the name of morality, chances are that person isn’t worth the effort it would take to appease them.

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.