Never Walked In High Heels

For someone who’s entire life seems to be based on the focus of going beyond the accepted borders to strive for excellence. It is easy not to put trust in the negativity that those around you expel. A Chinese proverb says, “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it,” and if there are certain individuals who you know will be naysayers to your cause, your best bet is to avoid them at all possible cost. Unless of course, they were once positive about your ambitions and insisted on offering you encouragement during the difficult days. Last summer, I ran into such a teacher who for years before insisted that I would go far in life. She gave me every possible encouragement that she could muster and four years ago I was incredibly grateful. Starting out on my own and attempting to get my bearings as well as get directions. This summer however, she offered no such encouragement. Instead I found her cold, harsh, negative. Her own life had been degraded in recent years and she found it necessary to do the same for anyone else she came across, including me. Where there was once warm support and encouragement, there was now fatalism.

After class one evening I found myself hiding in a brick garage off of Tottenham Court Road, the hot tears running down my face and spilling over my eyes almost uncontrollably. Among other things I could think of to do, I finally rang up a friend of mine who was sitting at home watching television and told her of the confrontation. “She told me I would be better off living in a home.”

“What! In what context?!” I explained the situation saying that the altercation finally ended with her stating that the best bet for me would be to only work for the disabled population for the rest of my life.

“Is it true?” I asked, fearing the response.

“Of course not, don’t be stupid.”

I once asked my pastor when a person can tell the difference between perseverance and plain stubbornness. He explained that in the first, your closest friends and loved ones will encourage you. In the second, when those that know you best begin to question your motives and actions you know its time to take a step backward and reevaluate the aim of your self journey. I always took this advice as wise and solid but then that night, huddled on Tottenham Court Road, I realized something else. Sometimes, in the course of your journey, the people that you assumed were closest to you actually stopped traveling by your side a few miles back and they are no longer your top advisors or safe places in which to store confidence. They are in fact, no longer with you.

Sometimes the goals of a person don’t need to change, the entire system needs to be reevaluated.

It’s always shocking when someone you thought was constantly going to be supportive and there for you says, “Thus far will I travel with you on the road, but no further.” Either they no longer have the energy to encourage you or they disagree with your choice of destinations, perhaps they have come into their own crises in life which are causing them to reevaluate everything. Regardless of the reasoning, of course at first all you feel is abject betrayal, the idea that this individual was going to be a pillar of strength for your cause and now has backed out. Then, you have a choice…stay with the person as they have stopped traveling down your path in the hopes that eventually they will begin moving again. Or, leave them there and keep going, not waiting for the fallen pillar of strength to reassemble. Here you find the test between the value of the relationship and the value of chasing your dreams. Sometimes one more costly than the other, and often times you cannot have both.

A relationship does not necessarily have to end when such a person decides they can no longer support you. But, I have made the conscious decision to end a few as I did with my teacher on Tottenham Court Road that evening. I can’t speak to her reasons for insisting that I change the course of my life. I’m sure in her mind they were the humane ideas to express. But I know, that I can no longer depend on support from her. Often times we are unable to stay where we lose our friends and we find that the dream drives us forward even when they insist that they will not come with us. Sometimes such people do get moving again and we welcome them back, but often times the split is permanent. That evening I knew that such a split had occurred, one in which the divide would be permanent. And all I could do was come out of the garage, fling it over my shoulder, and head further down the road by myself. Hoping that somehow, my old teacher and I would cross paths again.

People often ask why I do not join a community built for cripples (actually they say “individuals with physical limitations” but the stigma is still the same). I have trouble finding friends who also have physical disabilities and when possible, usually find it best to look at a person not for what he can or cannot do, but rather, who he is or isn’t. In this way, disabilities are the last thing that enter into my mind when examining the qualities of a particular individual. Many I speak to often find this point frustrating, occasionally to the point of hypocrisy. For me, it is simply, life.

I was never raised to be disabled. Growing up, my family did everything to keep me out of an extremely flawed special education system. Even today, the United Nations report that only three percent of all people with physical disabilities in the world are able to read. (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=18) Among women, that goes down to just one percent. This means that out of four hundred disabled women in the world, only one of them is literate. If this shocks you, I’m not surprised. It is shocking. Our world is blissfully unaware of what living conditions are like world wide for people with disabilities.

Recently I saw a report from the mayor of London analyzing the learning conditions of persons with in a city some consider the world’s capital. The title alluded to the idea that people with physical limitations almost live in a different city than London. Being unable to use a form of mass transit such as the London Underground and unable to access many of the neighborhood shops on any high street, people who have any sort of physical limitation know a very different London than those who are able bodied. Transportation is slower, stores with narrow aisles a bigger challenge, invasive even, and the looks from people on the street will often send individuals back inside their houses in order to avoid hostile environments.

But being disabled does not stop with environmental issues. As in any civil rights battle, the problem is steeper and more complex than one would care to imagine. When I was growing up I heard over and over again, “Be patient with yourself” and “take it slow.” Now why I would ever want to slow down when it took me and hour and a half to get dressed that morning is beyond me. However, taking it slow often gets transformed into setting lower goals for individuals with disabilities. It means taking it easy rather than slowly chipping away at a complex algebra problem. Some things, particularly in education cannot be rushed but more often than not the goal post for disabled individuals is removed entirely so that a substandard type of performance becomes acceptable lessening the amount of homework problems, showing the student that he should only have to read the Cliff Notes rather than the whole book, or even insisting that a book is too difficult for a student to read are all common occurrences for someone who was raised to think of himself as physically disabled and therefore expected to take no initiative in his own life. Thus, more often than not, the great schism which faces individuals with physical limitations is not the level of access in their environment but it is their submission to a type of institutionalization which works for societies comfort rather than the students good.

As has been the case with civil rights issues in the past, this false education and insistence that individuals with disabilities are helpless is more detrimental than any staircase or missing form of public transit. It is through the educational system that individuals with disabilities are still often given different books, different classes, different teachers, and different expectations which causes the schism between the fully able bodied world and the disabled world to continue year after year after year. By insisting that the disabled world is somehow separate (nobody said anything about equal) from the way fully able bodied people live their lives means that there will always innately be that division between different people. Inevitably by keeping any population separated, society ensures that they are marginalized. The mayor of London is right, living in London with a physical disability means living in an entirely different city than Londoners who are able to get about without much thought. Perhaps this is why I am so impatient when well meaning individuals tell me to take it slow. It takes me so long to get to my destination in the first place, if I were to take it slow I fear that my world would stop altogether.

Those Who Used to “Teach”

It is often said that those who cannot do, teach. And as some members of my family would like to add, those who cannot teach go into education. But embarking on conservatory training I discovered that there are teachers who cannot do and teachers who can no longer do. Both often make splendid teachers. The teachers who have given up there own performing careers due to age or ailment are often times the most giving of their time and the most insistent on perfection, creating a rare combination of encouragement and admirable standards. All too quickly the image of ancient ballet teachers hobbling on canes comes to mind. People who have seen performance for what it is as well have seen their own careers dissolve through circumstances beyond their control and have thus rededicated themselves to improving other individual’s forms rather than other individuals chances to get into the industry.

A particular conservatory instructor comes to mind. He is an individual who was well known in his day as an incredible Shakespearean actor when, after a stage fighting accident during one summer, lost the use of his left arm. That was the only extent of his injury, however it was permanent and as a result of having a single limb immobilized had to give up his craft.

Sometimes I sit in the back of his class listening to him lecture or give advice to those of us performing and I often wonder what he thinks when he examines me in his studio. An injury, which from my perspective seems extraordinarily small (although I’m sure from his point of view, it was anything but negligible) ended his career decades ago and here I am more bound in my body than he is now despite his age, embarking on a professional acting career with the insistence that disability and physical condition does not matter. He, unlike some of my tutors never offers me a detrimental word or insists that I despair regarding my impending doom as a starving artist. His standards are set as high for me as anyone else and he insists that I can be trained.

I look at him lead the class in warm ups and articulation exercises and more often than not, I am struck by the constant reminder of my ultimate goals of being in art. I dream of a world where having an “imperfect body” or being seen as more representative of the human condition. I have a vision of a world where people take as little notice of physical differences as most people do different races and the insistence of segregating the disabled because they are different is labeled as “hateful” as racism or homophobia, and I believe that it is art, particularly acting which will help our society reach these goals as it normalizes differences and forces our world to look at situations and people which many would otherwise not run into living within their own suburban plan. I want to create art and act in pieces that reiterate over and over that losing the use of a single appendage is hardly reason to bow out of the industry and take up teaching as a consolation career when one is regarded some great tragedy occurs.

I sit in his class daily and come to the conclusion that I would hope if the same injury happened to my teacher today, he would keep acting, even in the face of adversity and insist that he belonged on the stage and his talent did not disintegrate as a result of losing the use of a single appendage. I want to help create the world in which he never had to quit due to an accident that was merely an unfortunate circumstance. I can’t help but wonder if, after the accident, he too yearned for a world where art could incorporate the realities of life.

When I was little, I used to love when summer was finally winding down. In June I would come home from school crying and asking, “What will I do for three whole months without school?” Back then, life followed a plan and June/July/August represented a purposeful part of that plan. Worse yet, the rhythms of the year were definite. September meant new shoes and colored pencils as I was heading back to school. Then came Christmas, Valentines Day, and when I was just beginning to give up hope, came the dreaded three months without school. Now that I have twelve months a year without school, I’m not exactly sure what the end of summer means anymore.

The truth is, without consistently being in a classroom with the dates splashed on the bulletin board, I have difficulty telling what time of year it is anymore. The holidays marked by paper cutouts with snowflakes and candy canes stapled to the wall come and go without much recognition in my own life. There aren’t spring themed words or seasonal linear graphs that turn out to be in the shape of Santa Claus. Now the months just slip by and I am surprised on October 31^st, my doorbell rings and there are children asking for candy.

This of course is the crux of the change from childhood into independent adulthood. Your life is no longer well defined. You don’t have guide posts and deadlines to set. Grades, when you are a child, are a form of currency so that your first year out of college one can’t help but be a little bit confused when they hold cash in their hand rather than a report card. There is no rhythm to the seasons; there is no plan in what you are doing in your life and perhaps most disturbingly, there are no awards for perfect attendance.

If you are working in one of the creative fields such as a visual artist, actor, or writer, the situation is even worse. The days slip through your fingers as quickly as water until you realize you have spent the entire day looking at a blank computer screen and only managed to type out a few words. Here in this adult life, one is forced to quantify oneself not by merit or test grades, but by inner thoughts and actions. It’s the conversations that an individual has with themselves and the results thereof to give you an idea of their self worth. The rest of the world’s actions are justified by paychecks. When someone is an actress or writer, there is no such thing as regular paycheck and so the end of summer. As I continue to go to auditions and look at my blank screen while attempting to figure out what comes next.

Were it not for a gradual shift in weather, needing my jacket at night, pulling out the fall fashions and looking longingly through catalogues, I might not even notice the shift in seasons. This is one of the many reasons why I consider it a blessing to live in a place that has winter, spring, summer, and fall. For me the end of summer doesn’t mean the end of free time. As much as I miss the rhythm and cadence that comes from the school year, the product of it is actually a huge blessing. Western education teachers say money is the most precious form of currency, it does nothing to acknowledge the expensive nature of the economics of time, health, and happiness. I will continue to work on whatever, even if the year is ebbing away unnoticed. Nothing reminds me of that blessing now, more than the end of summer.

Last week I was watching my next door neighbor head off to her first day of school; her bright pink backpack and pigtails almost made the entire image look like a cliché rather than real life. Even though I swore I never would be, I was slightly jealous of her returning to the structure that comes at this time of year. But most of all, I was jealous of all the discoveries that lay ahead of her within her own time.

Not long ago I sent out an email asking for help regarding a dilemma I was facing. Most people emailed me back offering suggestions or saying that they were stumped, except for one woman who was in my masters program last year. She wrote me the following:

“I can appreciate what you are going to do, but it’s only going to result in costing you more money. You’re better off quitting while you are ahead. After all, you can’t change the world, so why do damage to yourself while trying?”

I realize, of course, that no single person can change the world. Indeed it is arrogant to think otherwise. The economic philosopher F.A Hayek once wrote “Nothing has brought as much hell on earth as people trying to make it a paradise.” And indeed, my generation is particularly culpable of running around attempting to justify the action(s) of that behavior by persuading ourselves that if only this one thing was different the world would be exactly as it ought to be.

But I can save someone’s world, even if it is my own. By nature, I am not particularly a small-scale thinker. When most people in college were volunteering to teach a single school child how to read, I quickly found myself working in three different ESL classrooms. The truth is I was never very effective in any of them because I was spread out so thin

.

This, I suppose, is the deity of human interaction, because to change the world simply means to change the world of one individual. Simply teaching a child how to do long division radically changes his world. And when that individual’s world has changed, he is able to press on and teach someone else the same skills which you have taught him. Thus you have greatly altered not the child’s world, but those he taught as well.

Metaphysics talks about a problem which is briefly titled “Possible Worlds”. The idea, though somewhat strange, is rather simple. In this world, my nail polish is bright red, but there are a million possible worlds out there which we may or may not be aware of in which my polish is bright green, purple, orange, or even black. Simply because we are not aware of these possible worlds in our own world does not mean that a world where I have chosen to paint my nails black, does not exist. It just means that in this world, we are not aware of it. When we take the time to touch each other’s lives, and to improve the world that we are aware of, we give each other glimpses of what better worlds, that is what possible worlds, are out there.

The family of a girlfriend of mine decided over the course of about ten years to adopt eight Russian children, all of them related in various forms. When I tell this story, particularly to people in the UK, I often get a comment that my friend’s family “over-adopted” and thus most likely spread themselves so thin that they will never be able to take care of all of those children adequately. It’s true, those children will not have as much individualized attention from their parents as an only child living under the same conditions. I was appalled when someone said “What are they trying to do, adopt all of Russia? Change the entire problem? The entire orphan problem?” No family in their right mind is ever that arrogant.

What they did try to do was change the world for eight Russian children who would otherwise be facing a bleak existence separated from their siblings in orphanages spread out across a massive country. And the parents themselves say that as much they managed to changed the world for their children. But their children have enhanced their world. That’s the way that great ideas work. Someone who improves the world of someone else in need will surely become the recipient of a changed world. And, unlike my friend who insists otherwise, perhaps will so much easier say that worlds, when looked at on an individual level, are much easier to say than we might think.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

I was in a small group this week where we were studying historical intricacies of the Bible. In many Christian circles, one is never given the opportunity to ask about what facts there are available from the resources of archeology and history which can bolster our faith on the days when all reason points to doubt. Much of the modern church seems to take the idea that we have been ‘saved by faith’ as a reason for us to keep our eyes closed the rest of our lives.

Turns out, there’s a lot of evidence I never heard about in my Sunday School education. And I can think of no reason why this would be so. Much of this evidence would help me to understand theological debates better, rather than shaking my beliefs. Why then have I never heard of these sources which can act as corroborating evidence, or translations which would help me to understand nuances in the Bible that people point to as contradictions. Why was I never even taught how the Bible was put together in the first place?

When I went away to uni, a theologian who was also a member of our congregation got wind that I was planning to take a philosophy class my first semester at school. The man begged my father to dissuade me from doing so, citing the plethora of young people who had lost what they believed in university classes. Thankfully, my father refused to take his advice. Why would any theologian, who knows what he believes to be truth, be afraid that his beliefs would not stand up to questioning?

The irony of the entire situation is, of course, that if students are never challenged in their faith, it will never grow strong enough to stand up to a debate or even an honest question. As is the case in any field, if something doesn’t stand up to questioning, what exactly is the point of fooling yourself into believing it? Challenging one’s own beliefs is like taking a hammer to the hull of a boat: you may learn where the boat is going to spring a leak… but you might learn that the entire boat was a lot stronger than you had originally thought. Either way, the boat needs to be checked over well before you send it out to sea.

So why don’t we bother looking at the common challenges raised by any of our beliefs rather than examining them fearlessly? This is one of the many places where organized religion as a whole fails miserably. Dostoyevsky argues in his The Grand Inquisitor that it is because most people are afraid of responsibility and freedom that they would rather run to a mind controlling church. To a point I think he’s correct, but there’s something more insidious than feeble going on as well. If our believes don’t have to stand up to the challenges placed before us, then everything is under control and whatever we base our world around is completely tame. The leap of faith becomes a bunny hop, and we understand the universe completely.

What we miss in that flat world which we think we understand, is the breathtaking intricacies in which faith is rooted.

“He who says it cannot be done should not be the person doing it” –Chinese Proverb

I used to think that every man wanted to see progress in the world. When I was little, I simply saw things getting continually better. Computers got better, sleeker, more responsive, we celebrated men like Martin Luther King Jr. and learned about the appalling slave trade of the South. History for me was a progressive march towards finding man’s rights and making the world more livable for all. And so I thought, this is what everyone wanted—that we all work together to make the world a better place.

A friend of mine this week told me that my dream was impossible. Just flat out no, if, ands, or buts, it was never going to happen, so I should quit trying now, impossible. And though it was the first time, coming from him, it was not the only time in my life that I had heard that something was, “impossible.”

People who say things are impossible are more often than not proven wrong. The company IBM used to say that someday there would be a market for as many as 5 computers in the world, and at the time I can see why people would think having multiple computers in one home was impossible. It’s not that I believe they were vicious; it’s just that they didn’t know any better. Can you imagine what folks said to the Wright brothers as they built their airplane or NASA for that matter? Again, ignorance and a lack of imagination are often two of the greatest things inhibiting progress.

However, I didn’t realize until recently that most people are really quite comfortable remaining ignorant and having no imagination. This is the newest disturbing fact I’ve found in my adult life. Rather than reaching beyond what they think they are capable of, people stay stuck, sometimes for perfectly good reasons like putting food in their family’s mouths, but they are stuck nonetheless and then resent others who fight to remain unstuck. Change does happen beyond the wildest dreams. If you could go back in time and tell Harriet Tubman that we would one day have an African American president, she would probably have been shocked. Or what about someone recent as Martin Luther King Jr, who made his “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 40 years before Obama received the democratic nomination at the national convention. He probably would have laughed—they both would have, and chances are they wouldn’t have believed it. My entire life, people have told me that things are “impossible,” and recently I heard it from a close friend—someone who I thought would never say that word to me. After 25 years, I would think folks would know better then to begin to tell me that something is impossible. Everything is possible, and particularly for those of us who are willing to sacrifice what it takes to reach for it. Dreams of justice and equality, honest representation, and balanced creativity for tomorrow, must always survive the inadequacies of today. Dreams worthy of coming true will always come true.

I will close by addressing the men against innovation and progress. Perhaps you are one of the people who insist on living in fear, or perhaps your horizons stop with the limitation s you see before you. Either way your world is small. And while people with small worlds have an important and practical place in society, you do not know the entirety and vastness of the universe. None of us can. How can you begin to say that something is impossible when you’ve simply never seen it and never dared to explore what it would take to achieve it? Just because it is something you have never seen does mean that it does not exist. You have chosen your world and it is compact and probably serves you well, but please let us choose ours.

Back in the classroom, Socrates was relentless towards the mind of sixteen year olds.

“Can we ever be untied? Look on a map, America is huge. Alaska, Kansas, New York all in one country. Let’s be reasonable.” Now he was doing his best to push everyone’s buttons.

I’ve been out of college a short while now and already two of my friends have needed to apply for handicap parking placards. Two years ago it was unthinkable, now they are applying for the blue placards which are permanent, rather than the temporary red ones. For someone who has found how we are all alike more interesting than how we are all different, the connection is striking. For most of us, as we age, America will be shrinking. What is different about disability rights from most civil right battles is that nobody will wake up suddenly being a different race, gender, or creed than when they went to bed. Life can change in an instant in that going for a jog one morning may be the last time we ever do it. This may be as simple as a bad knee or as traumatic as a car accident, but everyone’s body will fail him. Moreover the inaccessible America you  permit today is going to be the same one you will inherit tomorrow when your body breaks down. I’m not just advocating for my rights. I’m advocating for yours

But even the politicians, the ones who are supposed to be directly enacting the Constitution, remain blissfully unaware of how small America is on this issue. In between welfare reform and environmentalism, gay marriage debates and school vouchers, when was the last time you heard a story about disability rights on a news station? I can think of only one politician who consistently brings up the issue in her platform. Other than that, I feel like everyone else’s issues get debated in Washington except mine. Even though all men are ultimately feeble, the needs of all men are ignored.

What I learned that day in the classroom, took an additional six years to finally reach its full meaning. Like so many other things in life, you don’t realize what rights are until they are taken away. It’s as simple as someone in the grocery store insisting that I really want skim milk when I’m reaching for the two percent. Most people when they think about disability rights think of assisted care or special services. I don’t need that. I just want to get where I’m going unimpeded by a staircase, someone who thinks they know my limitations, or even an overbearing special service. Don’t give me add on’s until you’ve figured out how to fully give me my unalienable rights. This doesn’t mean I don’t have those rights yet. I still have them, America (or anywhere else I’ve lived) just hasn’t figured out how to respect them. Special care facilities, special education, even special funding is no replacement for freedom. Any revolutionary in American  history could’ve told you that. They could also tell you that sooner or later, that freedom eventually came. Even after living in the real world, I cannot give up hope that I will join them.

“I’m still waiting for an answer.” He looks at what we are all looking at… the clock. Our books are still being clutched to our chests in anticipation. “Miss Stevens, you’ve had your hand up for some time now.”

“Maybe the phrase all men expands as civil rights expands… Uh… It could’ve meant all males with property then but now it means all humans… or-or at least it should.”

“Go on.”

“It just expanded to incorporate more and more people until today, everyone is equal.”

“So the history of America-“

“The history of America is the story of the phrase ‘all men’ expanding.” He looked at me and nodded approval. The bell rang.

That’s what I said one rainy August morning when I was sixteen. It would take me years to learn the weight of what it meant.

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

“What  kind of kooks would claim equality as a birthright? I mean the idea’s insane. Can anybody in this classroom, in 2000 give me any absolute proof that the man who wanted to wash my windshield for a buck this morning and Bill Gates have an equal chance in life? Anybody?” The teacher was already passionately walking around in circles and raising his voice. “You can’t do it, just look at the world.”

People who pass me on the street tend to see what I can’t do when really, they don’t know the half of what I can do. The idea that God made all men equal is great in theory, but hard to believe in practice, particularly at first glances of other people’s conditions. We live in a world, I came to find out later, where most people will define you by what your abilities are not, not what they are. Oddly enough, this way of defining humanity is precisely what splinters people so that we question the meaning of “all men.” By categorizing everyone so that “we are all different” there is no longer a solitary unit of mankind. If there was, nobody would question what was meant by “all men” in the first place. Thus we do not allow Jefferson’s ideal to be fully accomplished.

“I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what ‘all men’ means,” he says after a brief tangent about the Civil War. “Did the constitution change when we freed the slaves? Don’t think you are getting out of  here without answering the question. I don’t care if the bell does ring.”

I realize now, that my so called “America” ends with the first unramped sidewalk  I come across, regardless of what the law says. Certain doors, both metaphorically and physically, remain impossible to open and you can recite what lawmakers say until you are blue in the face, it doesn’t mean anything. If America is a place where people are “endowed by their creator to certain unalienable rights,” then you don’t realize how small America actually is when your are sitting in your high school U.S. History class in your wheelchair. You can’t know that, because all the same teachers see you everyday, they know you for you, meaning that there is nothing to prove, and every day you open every door, even if it means asking a janitor, in Spanish, how to unlock it. Then when you get through the graduation line and out into the public you’re shocked by how many variable friction door handles there are which, of course, you can’t hold onto, how many huge cracks there are in public sidewalks from endless cycles of ice freezing and melting, and how many oblivious people there are out there who don’t listen and can’t stand the thought of either themselves or me being independent . Outside of a classroom, American progress rarely goes in a straight line.