Never Walked In High Heels

“Hi. Why are you still in the UK? I hate London. I hated it when I was there three years ago. Nobody is friendly…I don’t get what you’re doing spending your time over there.”

This was how he opened his phone call to me. The next hour was a barrage of attacks about how not everyone got what they wanted out of life and it was time for me to come home. Every time I pointed out that I owned my own company or that I was paying my rent just fine, it didn’t seem to matter. Then came the killer statement, “What you need to do is move to New York City and write about being disabled for disabled people.” It was a suggestion that was completely impractical. I’ve never been to New York and I don’t know anyone in the entire state. The suggestion was insidious as it prayed on my faults and immature desires to quit and go home after a difficult year. But when you know it’s the wrong thing to do, and the last thing you need to hear is that you should quit and go back home. It was insulting because after 10 years of knowing me, all he thought I was capable of doing was writing at my desk to a 100% disabled audience.

If the phone call had been from a family member, I would have been able to handle it better. But this was one of my best friends—someone who had taught me since I was 15. I sat in the back of his classroom with my hand raised for three years asking questions and learning about the world as he saw it. A high school teacher’s job is to prepare his students to face the frightening prospects of an infinite universe, and to equip those students with the tools they need to succeed beyond there wildest dreams. This was the man who taught me that my mind and my capacity for thought and innovation was unlimited and a great gift to be embraced. He was even a man who went to bat for me against the high school administration, insisting that I would not be put in a special education classroom and swearing up and down that doing so would be a “grave injustice to her mind.”

And here he was now, not recommending or even insisting, but it felt like demanding, that I quit and move back to the States in order to go the safe route. “Most people want A, B, and C out of life but they don’t get A, B, and C. They have to settle for E, D, F. You’re job is to figure out what kind of E, D, and F you have to offer the world.” Is this the same person that I read Catcher and the Rye with? The same man who told me stories about going to Morocco and encouraged me to do likewise after college graduation? He had been one of my support structures and was now feeding me platitudes about life that I wouldn’t have even thought him to believe.

I finally hung up on him after and hour. I couldn’t take anymore. He continued despite my insistence that I was paying my rent, I was learning from the real world, and there were things in London I couldn’t leave. “Like what?” he questioned indignantly. Like the company, my company and the friends I’ve found over the past three years, all of the professional connections I had built up, my home, my church, my life. Even though the going was tough, I couldn’t just get up and walk away from it.

After a few days of cooling off, I realized that one of two things had happened. Not seeing him for three years meant that I no longer knew him, and he no longer knew me. Either way there was a rift, and given his response to my pleads and insistences that he see the truth, I wasn’t sure I wanted to fix it. His mid 20s may have been the time that he decided to leave Morocco to come back home and teach, but I wasn’t ready to do anything of the sort even as noble as teaching was. I still feel deeply called to take on the challenges of the unfamiliar and boundless world he taught me about. Not going to familiar territory to receive the consistent paycheck and live the easy life. When I was younger, he challenged me to do exactly what I am doing. His current insistence of dropping what I am doing just because it is difficult doesn’t fit with the worldview that he helped to give me. And so, although I’m not sure who it was I talked to over the phone, I refuse to go home and lead the comfortable life. If that means I am a disappointment, or so beyond what a mentor thought I was capable of then so be it. Part of growing up is realizing that nobody has all the answers, and that we’re all really trying to get by on a ninth grader’s wet shoestring. The second we realize that about ourselves, our parents, our mentors, and everyone else we meet, the horizons open up and you see the freedom to make yourself and this world what you want it to be—something you never knew you had.

             It’s the mother lode of clichés. You hear the recording full of static as Roosevelt takes a deep breath. “The only thing we have to fear is…” dramatic pause. Yeah, I get it, I know what you’re going to say. Come on, come on, come on… “fear itself!” The punch line has been delivered, and we can all go back to dismissing the bromide all Americans have heard a thousand times before.

              I’m sure when FDR made that speech he wasn’t expecting it to be replayed until it had lost all meaning for future generations. I never really thought too much about it until this weekend, when I found myself coming from a small town paralyzed by fear and then it took on a whole new meaning. What I always assumed it to mean was that people had nothing to fear and that there was this feeling out there called fear which was only for fools to react.

              And then this weekend I spent time with people who lived in stagnant fear. Not terror mind you, but plain, simple, fear. The difference is striking. People all over the world live in justifiable terror where there is unspeakable violence, horrible threats, and a justifiable unknown of what tomorrow may bring. According to the Oxford American dictionary, fear is classified as “a belief” which, by definition may or may not be based in fact. Conversely, terror is “a state” caused by something directly. Terror, it seems, is concrete and is caused by dangers whereas fear, is not. The people that I am speaking of live in fear, although of exactly what I do not know.

              I know they are living in fear because fear is paralyzing. This is what I have failed to notice about Roosevelt’s statement until now, the reason we must be afraid of fear is because this emotion, above all others, stops us dead in our tracks. By definition, you cannot run from a belief because there is no way to tell what direction leads towards safety. Fear lurks around every corner because it manifests itself in your mind. Thus, your entire world begins to shrink down to where the shadows don’t reach. But any wall brings its own manufactured shadow.

              I could give you the specifics of the fearful nature of the people I spent my weekend with, but in truth it seems like they’re mere generalities describing the fearful times we live in today. One woman was afraid the world was ending, another that her money would soon be worthless so she refused to spend any of it. There was a farmer afraid of fixing his tractor because of what his co-operative would think of his budget, and a kid refusing to go to school because he may fail out. These are the nebulous fears which follow us all and a person from a different demographic may even call them worries. But they each, in one form or another, stop life.

              Perhaps it took another economically tough time for me to understand what fear actually is. I would hear that there was only one thing to fear and wonder what anyone could feel staring down the barrel of a gun which Roosevelt would deem an appropriate response. But as a man with polio, I’m guessing he knew fear and he knew terror. He knew the terror of a body slowly destroying itself across the hours, and the fears of having to figure out how to live life all over again. No doubt he saw that each was very different. And while terror causes you to embrace life as you’ve never gone after it before, fear can only lead to shunning it altogether. And while there are plenty of dark forces out there, the most frightening is the one in which you willingly surrender life.

It was a terrible year. I knew it was a terrible year when on New Year’s Eve, I saw a group of individuals coming out of their celebrations saying, “Next year has to be better, it cannot keep going as badly as this.” The following year did seem to be hard on everyone. Personally, I had a boyfriend walk out on me, lost my job, and dropped out of a masters program to which I had for years dreamed of getting in. I called my former teacher from high school one weekend, upset, frustrated, and about ready to put a hole through my wall.

“I seriously think I’m going to have some big life changing event just to get out of this horrible situation. Maybe I’ll become a lesbian.” I joked at him. Knowing that with his own homosexuality, he would get a kick out of this.

“No, don’t become a lesbian. You’d look terrible in flannel.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at his bluntness. He asked me what good was happening in my life and I struggled to come up with something. He asked what my new apartment was like and I told him about the plumbing that had broken three days before, and how I didn’t know where the money was going to come from to fix it. I burst into tears, saying, “This is not how I envisioned my life to go when I was in your class during high school. Not at all. What happened?” It was a struggle to get it back together, but I knew that if I kept sobbing into the phone, my teacher would never be able to comprehend a word I was saying.

“We’re living in the age of angst. There, Age of Angst, that should be the title of a book you write. Anyway, everyone’s having a hard time this year, not just you. And that’s ok. Sally has been having to take the past two weeks off. Her husband died two weeks ago. It was either a terrible accident, or, well, you know. He was always slightly bi-polar. So now she’s left with two young children, and very angry. I didn’t think she would be angry as much as grieving, but now anger is a large part of it.”

I stared at the phone, stunned, my jaw half open, before I felt the need to cry again for a former teacher of mine who was in extreme pain and heartache. During my year, she had just gotten married and the two of them were newlyweds, happy and faithful and full of the silliness that can only come out of a new marriage. She had no idea that this would happen. There wasn’t any sign of it. There had been friends that we all know who we have a pretty good notion from the get go that they’ll be in trouble sooner of later down their lives, but not Sally, and certainly not Sally and her husband as a couple. An early death and possible suicide was the last thing any of us could or would imagine for her. 

Truth be told, I honestly thought by the time I reached the age I was, that I would be married. Actually, growing up with movies such as the Little Mermaid, I thought it would be perfectly acceptable to get married at the age of 16. Of course, I also thought by now I would own my own pony, business, and would have completed law school. None of which, of course, is true. Turns out the pony needed too much food, the great idea of a business still has not come yet, and if things stay as they are right now, I really have no desire to go to law school. Life happens without warning and while some desires of ours are automatically built inside of us from day one, reality gets in the way, or at least rolls us into a person we never thought we would be. 

Perhaps it is a sign of youth that we can look at someone and say “well, that will never happen to me. He would never leave me like she was left. I will be able to stick to my ideals throughout, and eventually get exactly where I want to go.” Of course, things hardly work out according to our plans. Anne Lamot, says “If you want to see God laugh, show her your plans.” And it does seem that that’s often the case. 

But maybe this is all for the best that it couldn’t be any other way. When we are little, our parents tell us that we will have a life beyond our wildest dreams, and regardless of what we may think that means, at a young age we do indeed; at least I have had a life that far outweighs anything I could possibly imagine, and all of the dramas and thunderstorms ensured that the lows would be lower than I dared think about, and of course, the victories would be more surprising in the end.

In recent months, things have gotten a little bit better for me. Not much, but we’re going somewhere now. And I often think of Sally in my quiet moments, wondering how she’s doing, thinking of her teaching high school and raising two children on her own. Definitely not what any of us would sign up for in the beginning. With all that in mind, perhaps it is best we don’t know what’s in store for us when we are young. It would probably be too overwhelming to look at it all at once.