Never Walked In High Heels

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.”

The girl next to me was crying so hard that snot was coming out of her nose. I didn’t know it was possible to be next to someone who was sobbing so hard and yet feel absolutely nothing. Our director and leader of the course, I felt, had manipulated us all into this dramatic situation. For weeks she had been going on and on about how terrifying an impending environmental crisis would be, and that the government and news outlets had yet to report the “real” event that they knew was approaching. She warned the class that it would upset us all, therefore she would not tell us and then today after lunch she decided that she would tell us if we would vote unanimously that that is what we wanted to hear. I really didn’t care, but being the last person to vote out loud I said that I wouldn’t mind hearing it either. Within five minutes the girl next to me was in tears out of full, unadulterated fear about our impending doom which of course to her, would come in the next decade.

She was in one of those situations where she was afraid of not knowing the truth and yet horrified to learn about it. And so, she would remark later, she went home terrified, analyzing how her life would change should the economy collapse and clean water become impossible to find. She was shaking as she packed up her books, got on the tube and went to lie down in her own bed at home. Of course, on this particular day the sun was shining and the birds were singing. There was nothing to fear. That is how panic works. The nature of panic comes at its finest when there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It comes in and paralyzes us all so that even the daily tasks of getting out of bed in the morning become mountains to climb.

When panic comes into play we all stop thinking, which of course is the absolute worst thing possible to do. It is the equivalent of taking our hands off the wheel when we run across a patch of black ice while driving down the motorway. We stop thinking. We go into what is commonly known as “survival mode.”

Of course in our society today there are entire industries built on keeping panic alive within the population. One needs only to look towards journalism to see this, the health industry, the safety industry, the insurance industry. All of these different services are in and of themselves good. But they have figured out that if they keep people running around attempting to prevent one disaster after the next by constantly feeding them such a constant source of panic, its better for their industry in general. Who would not want to keep their family and loved one’s safe? Who would want to, after a disaster say, I should have bought X and Y and then all of our lives could have been saved. But its the equivalent of having one of those extremely draining friends who always need a crisis to be dealing with in order to make life interesting and so they flit, creating crises, squabbles, panic from one person to the next in order to ensure their survival and to keep themselves dependent on other people.

Inevitably, when we listen to the news broadcasts, the insurance commercial, read the health & safety pamphlets, we all fall for it. As if this world were at one time blissful and perfect, now needs us to be alert to all the dangers out there. The world was never without danger, there has always been some disaster looming on the horizon and sometimes unfortunately coming straight to our front door. Perhaps I can say this because in my own life, I have never known it to be anything else. In my own life I could see that once one battle is fought, another one will come, so forth and so on.

There finally came a time for me that I had been scared for so long, afraid of what school administrators might do next, what discrimination I would next encounter, what friend would get the next form of meningitis that able bodied people were not susceptible to. Eventually the panic wore off and I became immune. Realizing that this life, as uncomfortable as it often was, is what my life is going to be like. I might as well get used to that fact instead of succumbing to panic and not allowing anyone else to feed such paralysis.

It is the nature of panic to put blinders on. Permitting only a limited and self-centered view of the world. It is impractical, and more often than not succumbing to panic works its way into allowing room for a crisis to take over. Perhaps it is because I am a person of faith that I have generally accepted from day one, that the world will end. That is how my parents taught me, and so ironically, when we talk about the end of the world in classrooms and in debates, I feel nothing. Simply…happy that someday it will all be gone and perhaps there will be nothing or perhaps there will be something better to take its place. But that better option will never come, the improvements will never be seen and the joy we all long for will never be created if we succumb to panic.

It is a typical question my parents ask of me at about this time. The family letters go out mostly to people I have never met although heard about in stories from their time in grad school or law school, and in return we get pictures of new babies and blushing brides. It is without a doubt the Christmas card season, which in recent years has mostly been re-dubbed the Christmas letter season. The time of year where you attempt, usually in vain, trying to figure out the mail merge function on Microsoft word just to add a personal touch to a general form letter, thus making it look like you wrote the letter for a specific recipient all along. For the sake of our letter, if anything, I have been working on “This School Year,” I hadn’t thought of my life in terms of school years and grading terms for ages, thus reminding me how little structure and accountability I have in my life as it currently stands. And to be honest, I couldn’t think of a way to sum up my entire existence in one simple line. What was I working on? Part of me didn’t even know.

All of a sudden I feel an enormous rush to justify my self-existence. I want to find a masters program to enroll in, some sort of regime that I cant point to and say “See that? This year I am doing that.” But that is the nature of having a creative life. My life doesn’t fit into scheduled time tables. Some of my most important work happens between the hours of 9 o’clock and 12 o’clock at night. A friend once told me that being an artist is as much a life style choice as it is vocational decision.

He explained that his 30th birthday was spent cleaning toilets and living on the dole and that two years previous, when he was twenty-eight, his birthday was spent sipping champagne and eating strawberries. Being an artist means that you can fall down the ladder as quickly as you can climb up it. The structure and security is completely gone.

I’m sure, regardless of whatever my parents write, many of those who read the Christmas letter will think that I somehow managed to fail them. Growing up I was your typical success story: straight A student, never veering off course, the front row adolescent who’s mind was full of questions and never entertained rebellion. They used to tell my parents, “She’s going places. She’ll be great at whatever she does. I can’t wait to see her in the future.” And right now at least, all I’m great at is provoking a lot of instability in my own life.

By nature of my condition, much of my life has been spent with a sort of warped view of time.  When you are disabled, time slows down and success is largely relative for a kid who was never meant to live much further than her first evening. This means that growing up, taking your first steps at age ten, waiting until fifteen to attempt to ride a bike, still being unable to tie one’s own shoes, and even today, I must find great significance in even the smallest victories. As I wait, often overwhelmed by rejection and closed doors, I am forced to answer myself with regards to whom I’m writing and performing for. When I discover the answer, even the rehearsed readings and showings that occur inside an acting classroom become as important as any opening night on a West End stage.

My life, scattered as it is, has become impossible to sum up in a single letter, much less in a single sentence contained in a letter. I figured this out for myself my first year out of college when I attempted to write my own Christmas letters from the UK. All I could do was write each one out by hand and fill it with questions about the life of the recipient. This took pages and failed to pinpoint exactly what in my life I was accomplishing.

People who only know me by Christmas letters can’t really begin to understand what I am up to, so even a ten page letter I think, would illustrate that really I don’t know what I’m up to and perhaps my incompetency at running my own life would only be barely shown within a ream of paper. Nonetheless my parents pressured me to come up with anything to explain to relatives.  It’s not that my parents don’t love me or they don’t understand, its that they are at a loss to explain what’s going on. Sometimes I tease them, “Tell them that I am one of those people who change the digital clocks on banks every year during daylight savings time. That will illustrate some sort of stable success.” People remain unamused by this answer, looking for a simple one line statement of what I’m up to.

Most of all, I wish my parents just to tell their friends that I am well. Because I am well.

As soon as I saw him across the acting studio, something inside my brain said, “Steer clear, this one will break your heart, he is bad news.” The other side of my brain said, “Don’t be so judgmental, he hasn’t even opened his mouth yet. Give him a break.” So I got to know him anyway and we became friends over the course of a month and then a year later I discovered that the original alarm that had gone off inside my head was actually right.

We are told over and over again that one cannot judge a book by its cover but yet every once in a while a definite siren goes off in our heads and we are told very loudly that pre-judging someone is what we should be doing in order to steer clear of a massive problem. Certain signs we don’t consciously, notice and so we cant really justify why this sudden onset and strange feeling appears. Yet our subconscious sees them and the lights inevitably start flashing despite us having no proof. To discount those flashing lights is exactly what we are taught over and over that we are not supposed to do, “Don’t be judgmental, wait and let people show themselves according to their actions. Wait and love everyone regardless of how much your mind is unjustifiably screaming out ‘this is a really bad idea’”

Don’t get me wrong. I am, if anybody, the victim of first judgments. Often I wonder if people are incapable of hiding their first judgments as they speak to me as if my mental capacity was evident simply by observing my physical condition (this in turn gives me plenty of opportunity to judge them as I find that such an introduction is proof enough of action, but that’s beside the point) and we refuse everything only to say in the end, “We should have gone with our guts.”

What is the difference between a gut instinct and prejudice or a pre-judgment. I’m not really sure. Perhaps it’s only when you realize you were right all the time that you dare to call it a gut instinct, and if you are wrong or coming up with bad explanations, the world cries prejudice. Perhaps the difference is how hard one is willing to work against that instinct and how hurt one willing to be because that willful ignorance. Perhaps it is an item that only time will act as the great proof.

But I am learning, or at least trying to learn, to take those subtle voices inside my mind which do not come from a clear source, a little more seriously. Perhaps it’s a vain science experiment on my part to see how much of a soothsayer I can be. But in the end, I want to be able to look back and say “I went with my gut,” even if my gut was horribly horribly wrong. In my experience there is little worse than saying I ignored my gut and thus walked into a situation where my instincts told me I had no business. If I was warned internally that there would be trouble, it doesn’t matter how open or socially correct I was trying to be. There is no one to blame but myself.

A few weeks ago I witnessed my friend marry I guy I don’t particularly like. It’s not that he’s a bad person, but there are several red flags in their relationship already which make me very uncomfortable and I recognize these signs by failures in my own rocky friendships. It’s one of those situations where someone is so passive aggressive that it is hard to point to anything they are doing particularly wrong, but nonetheless  there are always stressful situations being handled very poorly.

When I last saw her before the wedding I tried everything I could possibly think of to understand what exactly she saw in this young man, and as a hidden agenda, I tried everything possible to dissuade her from marriage without saying outrightly “I don’t like the guy.” I was always hoping that by my questions, she would begin to question herself.  But the answers she gave me also satisfied her and so I returned home feeling frustrated that she was so convinced she was right.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m at an age where I have started to see my friends make mistakes. Huge mistakes. And I’m also at a point in my life where I am, perhaps for the first time, old enough to realize there is nothing I can do about those mistakes that they so readily endure. I can ramble all I want about my opinions but at the end of the day, many of my friends willingly choose not to listen at all and thus I have often learned it is best to say nothing and not ruin the friendship which might someday become crucial if my friends are ever unfortunate enough to fall into the mishaps that I unwillingly foresee. Often there is little I can do but sit and wait.

For this particular friend, it would be different if the guy she was going to marry was abusive or if she herself were somehow disabled or particularly vulnerable to living with a man who is far from being on par with excellence. However, in this particular case it is neither. I don’t think the day will come where he will ever turn around and beat his wife; and should she ever want to leave provided that her body continues to obey her as it does now, my friend will have no difficulty packing her own bags and walking out the door (or packing his bags and shoving him out).

Often it seems that the most loving thing is to give a friend the freedom to make mistakes while at the same time committing yourself loving them. I know this because I have gotten myself into similar, albeit more temporary situations. After one particularly hard separation, a friend called me and admitted that he saw it coming months before. “Why didn’t you tell me,” I bemoaned half angrily, half in mourning. He pointed out that despite his best intentions, I probably wouldn’t have listened anyways. And indeed knowing my faults as I do, had he expressed his reservations it might have made me all the more stubborn when it was time to get out. Forcing me to listen to him would without a doubt made the situation ten times worse.

I watch them walk down the aisle. Perhaps I am imagining problems or telling futures that belong to someone else and not to my friend. There is little I can do now as she prepares to put the ring on his finger and announce to everyone that they know their love is a commitment they are willing to work at no matter what the times may bring or the heartaches that may come as a result. All I can think sitting in the back pew, not knowing if I feel uncomfortable because everyone is feeling joy or something else telling me that this isn’t right.

I just hope they make it.

My friend is more than happily drunk in the middle of making disparaging socio-economic comments and spouting off some of the most absurd political philosophy I have heard in my life. He spills part of his drink on the floor. We are in an English pub and as per usual, I am witnessing a social debate which would never hold up in practical circumstances. I can tell that everyone is looking at me, expecting me to say something to end the argument. I am notorious for pointing out logical flaws, particularly late at night and when others are inebriated. However I don’t want to say anything and to avoid eye contact, my iPhone is suddenly transformed into the most fascinating object in western civilization.

One of the worst things about having different physical limitations than everyone else (I almost wrote socially abnormal, but then realized that deep down we all fit into such a category) is that you have to work twice as hard to fit in. Growing up, the first two weeks of a new school were always awkward. The first few days the entire class would sit and stare at me in silence as I attempted to answer questions. An icy glaze covered the entire classroom as soon as my hand rose above my head to speak.

First impressions are always important. A visible difference between you and the standard norm, either in physical deformity, disability, or simply the wrong hair color sets everyone’s judgment against you. Suddenly all of the lessons that you learned in kindergarten, the ones about it doesn’t matter what you wear and all that counts is what’s on the inside, no longer apply. Now all that matters is who you are on the outside and how you portray yourself to the outside world. What you wear, how you speak, all contribute to a strangers quick judgments. People often look at me and assume that I have mental limitations as well as physical ones.

In my particular case, this means that there is no room to make mistakes on those first impressions. Growing up, going all through the month of September meant not raising my hand unless I was absolutely positively sure the answer I had was correct. This of course puts an end to most educational ideas. The world around me did not allow mistakes. Later in life this meant not entering an argument until I had reasonable and logical proof to point to. This was translated into refusing to be a hothead in pubs. Such a refusal goes strikingly against my nature. When you have a disability, there is no room to blurt something out without thinking. Doing so runs the risk of people automatically assuming that you are mentally retarded and usually, such an assumption is set against you anyways. Needless to say, all of this severely limits debate involvement while intoxicated and entering into arguments with intoxicated people.

I would like to live in a world that afforded me unreasonable arguments every once in a while. I would like to have an opinion and not have anything to back it up, but just keep it out of sheer pigheadedness. Unfortunately having unbridled opinion is something I can’t admit to having in public which, when I do have stubborn opinions, makes me want to hold them all the more tightly when I am amongst friends who already know that I am not what I fear to be. In an equal world, I would be able to let my guard down, but that has yet to occur. Rather, there are carefully measured times in which I can assert my views without fear of being judged the wrong way and times that I cannot. While this is true for anyone, usually it doesn’t automatically place you in a certain intelligence quota. The bombastic assumptions which are often thrown in my way doesn’t necessarily limit my freedom; my self expression is a choice I will always make. Sometimes I do limit myself by keeping silent and watching someone else actively prove himself a fool.

I know we love each other because we can scream at each other without worrying that it will ruin our friendship. Despite anything we say or might disagree about, or no matter how deep the issue runs, before the sun sets it will all be fine. Secure love, the best kind of friendship there is, can survive through rough waters even when going through dangerous territory is self induced. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion, but in fact the people who you love the most are the ones you can allow to see you at your worst. Anything short of that and the relationship is built on very unstable ground.

There is of course a cliché that any couple doubtlessly believe when they first get together, and that is the idea that “we will never fight.” We hear this particularly as girls in our infancy seeing Disney movies and countless happily ever afters. All of this is infinitely harmful to our idea of what love is. More often than not, young women (and probably men, although I can’t speak from first hand experience on this one) will do anything to avoid conflict just for the sake of living up to hopelessly high expectations. Not only do they change small preferences such as what items they would normally order off a menu in order to seemingly agree with their date, but eventually it reaches into other areas as well. What they say, what movies they prefer, what books they read, and eventually what ideals they hold. All of this to be able to give the illusion that indeed, together with their mate, the two are the perfect couple.

Our idea has changed from the notion that love conquers all except for conflict and disagreement or, better yet, love can conquer anything except pure honesty. What this does is shatter our expectations of what love is. If an honest opinion is something that love won’t stand, what hope does love have to conquer any struggle?

Too often I have witnessed my female friends trying to soften the blow of truth when a situation is particularly sticky. They wind up selling half truths and reinventing the situation for someone who they are attracted to in order not to shock their potential soul mate or at the very least, to coax their lover into agreeing with their own opinions. If you have to do this, then your problem is not breaking news to someone, your problem is the entire relationship being on unsteady ground.

During one of my favorite moments in the film “Juno”, the father states “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is going to think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person worth sticking with.” His statement doesn’t sound romantic at all, but it’s true. Every relationship is going to go through periods of conflict and that is the basis for sharpening each other, making each other better, more loving, and more human than the two of you could be on your own. This is the beauty of a relationship that works.

I’ve often heard it said that lover’s quarrels are the worst kind of verbal fights around, and in many ways, true. That’s how they should be. After all, if you can’t really fight with the person you love the most while understanding that the freedom that tomorrow is another day with new challenges and testing new boundaries of your love for each other, there’s really not much hope of any relationship surviving.

The year is more than three quarters of the way finished and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world. As a challenge to myself I have decided as a new years resolution back in January that I would go an entire year without watching a single news update. As a result, it would not be too much to say that from my point of view, the entire world has changed. I find that as a result of not listening to the news I have much more love to give and many more experiences that I cannot help but think of whenever I enter a pub and hear the men arguing back and forth.

The people who are directly in front of me in my life, I am able to look at and think of more often. I am no longer interested in what their argument is and how I can persuade them to agree with me. I watch people as they talk to me and become concerned with their news and their lives, realizing that what the media constantly puts on as being crucial doesn’t matter so much as examining the lives of the people directly in front of me and seeing what exactly needs to be done to improve our own condition. The most important people in the world are not the ones with the power that live in big houses and have three different secretaries, rather they are the individuals who go out of their way to show me love and are able to experience life in tandem with me.

Furthermore, not watching the news ended all hopes of there ever being any sort of justifiable television watching. The news is the appropriate form of procrastination when one really stops to think about it. It’s the pretense of being actively concerned with the world and hoping to reshape it combined with a sense of false charity that allows an individual to feel good about himself and remaining educated while still sitting on the couch all day transfixed with what the news reporter is saying.

And finally as a result of not watching the news, I worry less; or at the very least, I worry about different things. I realize that the over hyped and manufactured fantasies that scroll across the bottom of one’s television screen are just another turn in the cycle of history. And while technology, products and quite possibly the fashionable length of hem lines differ from generation to generation, the major debates do not. What is the role of the government in the life of the individual? How can we remain safe, protected, and free? What needs to be done to make the world better and what is being done to provide fewer amenities to those who actually need more?

I think with three quarters of the year already passed and myself blissfully unaware of what exactly has gone on in the news, I am forced to realize that the media hysteria which is masterfully fashioned as some sort of guerilla psychology is simply a form of socially acceptable attempts to change the world. Changing the world has never been something that is particularly well thought of or thought out within the drawing rooms of society. Talking about altering the world might be popular, but actually doing so and evading peoples’ minds and attitudes in order to see a necessary revolution is undoubtedly frowned upon. And so the people who watch the news are able to start off repetitively that which reporters have said with a twinkle in their eye, hoping that the rest of America will earn their trust and see current events from their own point of view rather than actually going forward and discovering how to improve conditions and make changes themselves. 

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.