Never Walked In High Heels

Through Fire and Friendship

By the time the phone was ringing on the other end of the line I questioned whether or not he ever wanted to hear from me again. It had been two years to the day since we last spoke and that conversation had not ended well. “Come back,” he had said to me. “Move to New York and…” for him the answers seemed so easy. To me they sounded trite. I screamed, he pushed back, and then nothing. That conversation was over and we went our separate ways.

The sound of an American telephone ringing its single long ring sounded foreign to me now. I had dialed the long-remembered number with a shaky hand after reading the news. His entire house had burned to the ground seven days before from being struck by lightening. And while no one was home on that fateful night, including his two dogs, nothing could be saved from the rubble. I called him out of gut reaction, thinking of his home and the beautiful things in it. In my younger days he had always seemed to me to be The Great Gatsby himself, with the exact home and life I had wanted. Yet, when he had invited me to do just that two years ago I had rejected him furiously, in a justified rage which burned out of control and smoldered for far too long. And now I hadn’t wanted his life for quite some time. I had my own. I am happy now, in London. Each day I find that my roots get deeper here, making me more and more stable in a town I am certain, for now at least, is my home. I had burned bridges with him to stay here. Now I wondered if he would let me swim back to meet him at the very least.

I wasn’t expecting him to pick up. He’s the type of man you always have to try a hundred and sixty seven times to get ahold of until it happens. I gasped his name and he shouted mine. And then the line went dead. Did he really hate me that much or had Skype failed me yet again? A screen popped up on my computer asking me a simple question: “Please tell us how you would rate your call?”

AWFUL. MISERABLE. I want to hunt down the moron who invented Skype this very moment and rip out his toenails after chucking my iMac into the River Thames. Somehow this wasn’t an option. I clicked cancel and redialed.

He picked up and said my  name first this time.

“Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“Nothing. Wait. No. Call me at this exact same time tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said reaching for my phone and wondering what meeting I had to cancel to make this call.

“Oh and, I’m sorry I have been such a crummy friend lately.”

“Me too.” We hung up. I couldn’t remember who forgave who.

“We are rebuilding,” he told me confidently. “It’ll take years to get it back to where it was, but we want to do it. I feel obligated in a way. It was such a lovely house and just added so much to the town.” I knew he was right. The home had most likely been featured in a plethora of home and garden magazines in the past two years. He had always loved opening his home up to people. I could tell this is what he was missing the most. “And when its all done we’ll have the biggest party you can imagine.” I already knew I wanted to be there.

He and I spoke for over an hour, which, for a man fielding calls from insurance people while trying to rebuild his life, is a very long time. I told him of my own fires over the past years, more metaphorical than his, perhaps, but every bit as searing. Two years ago he caught me at the front end of it. These fires were far from being put out but at least, for now they seemed to be under control.

“It sounds to me as if there is more than one way to burn a house,” his voice had changed dramatically. He was right. My own fires had forced me to stay here. Even when he could not comprehend it, I had to stay in London. I could not go ‘home.’ There was no home to go back to anymore. It is true, once you leave home, you can’t go back again.

There was the ash and rubble of the past several years. There were times of playing the fiddle while the flames raged on because there was nothing left to do. From all of this I had stumbled out, changed and transformed into a woman rather than the teenage girl he met thirteen years before. A few short years ago I thought fires shouldn’t happen. Now I’m a bit better at calmly walking through them without getting as burned. My friend had missed a good many of these fires over the past two years, even though they had been burning long before that. Maybe if he had been around the flames wouldn’t have gotten so high and enveloped me as much. But then again, without it all burning down, I wouldn’t have to get up out of the ashes and rebuild either. Without that, I wouldn’t be able to off my strength as a grown woman. Now that we had reconnected after two years I was his equal. And when everything goes up in smoke around you, sometimes what you need most is a friend who has also gone through the rubble and made it out the other side.

“It sounds as if you are exactly where you belong.” The silence was deafening on my end as I let these words sink it. This was what I longed to hear him say these past two years. It was all over. This fire had been smothered, the rubble cleared, and out of the ashes and destruction from two years ago came a new and stronger friendship, made purer by the flames.

“Let me know know if I can do anything for you.” Things were winding down and I just wanted to reach out and hold him in whatever way I could.

“I think you just did,” was all he said.

I hung up telling Skype that my call was ‘excellent with no problems.’ Walking into my room, I opened my window and looked over at Canary Wharf on a clear summer’s afternoon. I could feel my dress flapping at my ankles in the breeze. I think for my friend purified things were already appearing in the rubble after the fire. Our phone call was one of them and a redeemed friendship was another. They are small in the face of catastrophe, but they are glints and gleams of treasures  to come. What mattered was, after the fires, we both knew that there were some things worth the effort of digging out.

Most creative people will often say that they want to give up their profession for something more sensible. All armature dramatics aside, I often find myself debating on whether my career as an actress and writer will ever really be worthwhile. This is especially the case if you know you can do something with your life—anything in fact—you set your mind to. At my age, I am still young enough to go to law school or do a plethora of other things if I set my mind to them. I am often reminded that God tells us to wait and to trust him, which is a combination that contains two of the hardest things for me to do in my life. The combination is excruciating, and it seems that if I took things into my own control, everything would and should happen much faster.

Last week I found myself having such a day. With the assortment of facebook, twitter, and other necessities of the modern age, I am able to share in my friends milestones and see the lovely pictures that show up as a result—the weddings, the births, the job promotions—none of which have shown up in my life as of yet, and in many ways, I feel that my road stretches on and on before me without a single bend in it or any sign to act as a marker for how far I’ve come or how far I have yet to go. Still waiting for so much that I want to accomplish, often overshadows the massive amount that I already have.

When you first meet Jeremy you aren’t quite sure if he is an actual person or a character attempting to be a human being. He was a guest teacher in one of my acting classes last week—he creates the figure of a sort of man-clown, who dresses in a green hat and vest with a suit coat and a handkerchief. The sort of outfits that people used to wear all the time, but now when the entire ensemble is put together, looks vaguely comical. He goes about the country teaching that to create anything one must be willing to take risks. The risk of failure and then come to the realization that there is security in failing, especially when one hits rock bottom—for then there is then no where else to go, which can be any more diminutive and where the ground offers no padding but plenty of support. After a brief lecture, he took off his hat which in the style of David Larible, seemed to have a mind and style of a movie all its own. His hat came alive rolling across his shoulder, beckoning from the floor to pay attention to him, and finally in a brief moment of risk itself through it into us the class and challenged us to make it land on his single finger as he stood on a chair. I was not amused and for that matter neither was the rest of the class walking around the room which seems to be a favored activity among any and all acting teachers, was something that I found exhausting on that particular day. I didn’t want to train anymore perhaps if I did train to be an actor nothing would become of it. So, while the rest of the class attempted in vain to land the mysterious and seemingly rebellious hat on Jeremy’s finger I meandered around—not wanting to perform in the least. He rest of the class soon got fed up with the game and began tossing the hat back and forth to each other as much as attempting to take aim at the target.

Perhaps now is an appropriate time to say that I can’t throw anything. My aim is terrible and more often then not I am unable to let go of the object that I’m attempting to toss, so it falls to the floor. Even my dog knows this fact and when we attempt to play fetch together, he picks up the ball and throws it himself after my vain attempt to create some distance from the object has failed. Then after throwing it himself, he retrieves the ball and hands it over to me so that I may have another try. When I used to play competitive basketball, I was known as a “defensive player.” If ever I was in possession of the ball, one could be assured that something was completely wrong.

As the girls tossed the hat back and forth, I found not a familiar face in the entire class this being are very first time of meeting together. Whenever I am in the company of strangers I feel, compelled to justify my existence—to illustrate that I am every bit as capable in achieving my goals and keeping up with the best of them—but the need to justify oneself never leads to creativity. One of these strange and unknown students eventually tossed the hat to me and I quickly began to belittle myself. How nice I thought to myself, they wanted to attempt to include the crippled girl. I knew that attempting to land the hat on my teacher’s finger was completely out of the question, and so without thinking, I simply tossed it aside.

As I watched to see just how measly my throw had been, I saw the hat land squarely on the target.

By the time I got home that evening the shock of it still had not managed to wear off. It was an unbelievable and in many was inexplicable experience. Despite all this, it offered me encouragement. As cliché as this perhaps is to say, it is often when we take one small step backwards from our dreams to truly examine what we want and how far we are willing to go for it—one step away to attempt to gain some distance and perspective—it is then that we are able to perform are best. It is in taking this step in the seemingly wrong direction that we release ourselves from trying to justify ourselves and set free the creative forces, which are ultimately uncontrollable.

On that particular day, reaching my target in the little sense allowed me to reach for my dreams in the metaphorical sense. After all, the hat with my deficiency in aim and leverage could have landed anywhere in the room, and even though I was not thinking of it, it dropped off exactly where it needed to be.

By the time I put her on the plane, I had no idea how I was going to survive without my friend. A s.n.a.f.u at immigration put a friend who came to visit me on holiday back in the US for another six weeks. Thus all my plans for companionship, a friend to lend an extra hand, and not having to come home to an empty house, were thwarted.

At the same time, my long time assistant was moving out, leaving me very little time to find someone new to cook, clean, feed me my meals, and help with other minor but much needed tasks. Then, in a moment of divine irony, an email came through my inbox with the subject heading “What feeds you?” The gods were laughing.

The most difficult thing about my disability is that, even well into adulthood, I cannot make a meal or feed it to myself. All other aspects of life in a wheelchair I’ve just about been able to wrap my head around. I wear shoes which I never have to tie, I get my hair washed by a salon, I’m even quite good at flirting in pubs so I can get guys to help me walk down the stairs to visit the toilets. But all of this requires calories to burn, which in turn requires the intake of food, which is one area of my life that I have zero control over. Having to depend on others for food is like a country having to depend on OPEC for energy, sooner or later everyone else has you over a barrel.

I once heard a homeless woman being interviewed remark that the hardest thing about being in her position was not knowing where her next meal was coming from. Although I am far from being homeless, I know exactly how terrifying that feels. It is a kind of poverty which is not dictated by the wallet or by some stockpile of faith. At least three times a week there comes a point where I have no idea when or how I’m going to eat again and unless I’m willing to put some pieces together, I have no idea how that can possibly change. My last meal could quite possibly be exactly what it sounds like.

There’s about as many differing definitions for the word poverty as there are organizations set up to work towards its end. In my flat in London I’ve never dared to think of myself as being impoverished. But, after my curiosity being peaked and doing a little research, I realized that every single one of these definitions mentioned a lack of what is essential for survival. Does the fact that I have gone multiple days without food put me on the edge of the poverty line, even while I sit in a riverside flat trying to figure out the next alternative for food? Or perhaps this simply makes me a bad planner.

No parent wants his children to grow up not knowing where their next meal is coming from. For that matter no parent wants to see his child lack in anything. If the certainty of a next meal is the minimum standard for successful parenting, then my mother and father failed miserably. And yet the wealth of what they could give me allows me to survive in a world where nothing is guaranteed, even my next meal.

If poverty, as some organizations such as the UN defines it, is simply the lacking of a necessity in life, then we are all impoverished in one form or another. And in many cases it is the “wealthiest” amongst us who are actually the most impoverished. The myth of an independent and self sufficient life, reflected in even these definitions of poverty, not only perpetuates a misconception but also actively pulls us away from relationships of interdependence. If we are loved, we may not know where the next meal is coming from, but we do know those around us will not let us starve. Someone will notice, someone will help, provided we are willing to show our blatant vulnerability freely, and admit we are all lacking in something which is needed to survive this difficult task called living.

Looking back to the times I’ve been without food, without help, temporarily impoverished as it were, much of it has been due to my own stubbornness and unwillingness to admit to my own need. I am not saying that doing so would wipe out poverty or all hungry people would have their problems solved if they simply admitted they needed help. My disability does not go away simply because I have the assistance I need. The fact I am being fed does not negate the fact I cannot feed myself anymore than the fact a homeless man has a bed for the night negate the fact that he is, indeed, homeless. But we are lying to ourselves if we do not admit that each of us are in need of something which makes life livable.

I cannot feed myself and that’s awful. More days than I care to count I’ve spent vast stores of energy trying to figure out where my next meal is coming from. By some standards this would label me as being ‘impoverished.’ But it is what we lack as well as our excesses which make us interact and inspire life into each other when no other solution would allow us to maintain momentum. I am unable to eat on my own and the solution to this problem means I have a wealth of dinner dates and friends to meet for coffee who tell me that I feed them as much as they feed me. Usually I do a pretty good job lining up these appointments 3 times a day to ensure I do not go hungry. On the days that this fails, I am forced to admit my weakness rather than letting it be implicit. I am forced to call someone and say “I need help.” And I am forced to admit that with the number of people who love me enough to come to my aide, I am far from being impoverished.

What I Know Of Her Son

She is a woman who I have been wanting to meet for years. Ever since I first heard my friend describe his mother, I knew that she was amazing just by examining his outlook, and that she had a degenerative nerve disease. When he spoke of his mother, he keeps the latter fact quiet and simple telling me of what she’d done and what she used to tell him. “She’s fine…well she’s not fine she has a nerve disease. But it really doesn’t affect her that much.” And so, when I finally bumped into her visiting her son while walking down the road at a Sunday pace, I was surprised as she was further along in her condition that he had made it out to sound. As close as we were I wish he would have told me honestly what her status was like and what her troubles were. But maybe he is as blind to her disability as he is to mine.

I always wanted to meet his mother. It amazes me whenever I meet the parents of any of my friends. I begin to understand where they got their values and which matters were the greatest influences on their life. This particular woman raised my friend incredibly well. For my own sake, when I am out and dependent on him it is as close as I can possibly imagine to possibly being fully independent. In such cases I am particularly interested in meeting the mother of the family, mothers teach their children to stretch their boundaries and to think beyond what is normal in order to incorporate people of all types. The influence of such a woman can mean that for the rest of their life, their child does not feel awkward whenever meeting someone strange. Mothers open up the world of acceptability to their children, making the entire universe more inclusive. I have met two of this woman’s sons and I can safely say that she did a wonderful job in raising her children to be as accommodating and as understanding as human beings can possibly be.

As soon as we were introduced, her eyes lit up with a flicker of recognition. She was holding on to her walker and instantly called me by name. From this I gathered that she somehow knew my name and that it was familiar in their home. Watching her watch her son handle my bags and meet my needs for minor assistance, it suddenly dawned on me that this behavior that she was witnessing in the young man that she helped raise, nurse, feed and carry was new to her. She probably never saw anyone rely on him in such a dependent way as I do on a regular basis. The fact is, I depend on all of my friends, but particularly him, and I forget that this often looks strange to the outside world.

Then, almost instantly, I came to another realization, that because of her own disability, someday soon she will be dependent on him as well. For many individuals with a long term degenerative illness this impending dependency is the most fearful thing to overcome. The fact that someday you will be dependent on your children, and at that point in time it is how you raised them that will reflect on how they will take care of you. Again, it is the classical instance of an individual reaping what they sow. As parents teach their children to care for human life and value it in all its forms, the trickle down effect is that eventually they will be under the care of their children in one form or another. Those families who do not bother to teach their children such values and ethics will no doubt feel it when the older generation inevitably starts losing its own independence.

For me the most humbling realization was that suddenly I knew something about her children, particularly her sons, that she knew nothing of, that she would someday be reliant upon. In this small way, I know how her sons look out for people in need, protecting and advocating for them. Both in the slightest and most dramatic ways. They are both unafraid to feed someone when a spoon becomes too difficult to hold onto. They can tie shoes without breaking the conversation and are experts at making sure that someone not only survives, but that they are happy, healthy and know that they are valued. If such a day comes for her when she can no longer perform the tasks of daily living without a great deal of assistance, she will also find that her boys are exactly as she raised them and I am already thankful for those effects.

Somedays I wish I could tell her now that her children will take care of her when she is in need. I wish I could tell her that when her body rebels and she is no longer able to do what was once considered a natural reflex without a massive amount of frustration, she will have no need to worry. I wish I could tell her all the ways that I see my friend stepping up to the plate and preparing himself to take care of his parents when they grow older. I wish I could tell her all the stories of all the times he advocates for me, and that I am grateful to have such a fabulous friend.

And then I can’t help but wonder, if she and her husband raised their children to become such honorable and humane people, perhaps she knew what he is capable of all along.

When I woke up in the North Carolina humidity, the only thing more confused than my brain was, of course, my body. The cool shadows of the afternoon did nothing to stop the fact that I was sticking to the sheets, or that I was suffering from severe jet lag as I had just flown back to the States for a week to visit friends. It was two in the morning for me and my friend had just shaken me awake and murmured something about dinner. I placed my unsteady feet on the floor and made my way into the next room in hopes of getting my bearings a bit better. There, on the wall, was a map of the world and my eye flicked straight to where I had just come from: London, UK.

In that second I knew something in my life had changed.

Ever since I could remember, whenever I saw a map my mind would automatically look for Chicago, Illinois. This was where I spent the first twenty some odd years of my life calling ‘home.’ This could very well be attributed to the fact that Chicago has Lake Michigan acting as a large blue finger pointing to it for the rest of the world to notice. When I had completed college, spending all four years in the state of North Carolina, my eye would still jump to Chicago every time I looked at a map. I simply assumed, like so many other habits acquired in childhood, seeing Chicago first would be something I always did.

I stared at my friend’s map for quite some time attempting to almost drag my focus back to where it normally settles. Focusing my gaze there just felt uncomfortable and like a magnet I kept being drug across the ocean back to London. I went to help my friends cook dinner.

“Hey, when you guys look at a map, where is the first place you look?”

“Russia,” one friend said without thinking.

“Chechnya” blurted out another.

“Medellin, Colombia,” spilled from a third.

All of these places, random as they seem on paper, were not just places they had been to. Over the past seven years I had known them to go everywhere for months at a time as all three of them were desirous to pursue human aide as their professions. Rather, the specific places they mentioned were the areas they determined as where they wanted to serve for the rest of their lives. Here was where they had written me letters saying that they had fallen in love with the people who occupied the area. Here were the places that, when mentioned on the news, caused their hearts to skip a beat and then cry out in anguish. The places they named without stopping for a moment to think, were where they hoped to raise their families, live their lives, and invest in their professions…because they already knew that place would be home.

It was then it dawned on me for the first time, that England had somehow become my home.

I went back to the cool dark room which held the map after supper to rummage through my bags and find some toiletries. My eyes kept floating back up and finding the outline of England. I tried to think of possible explanations for this phenomenon but could find none. I hadn’t spent the last years looking at maps trying to figure out where I was as I did growing up. Outside of coming to America, I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a world map. I had spent the same amount of time away at university as I had in the UK and my eyes never searched for North Carolina. There was no habit I could think of to justify the new reflex.

By weeks end I was still searching out England before anything else. My best friend took me to the airport and although I was sorry to leave her, I couldn’t help but talk about the plans I had for the upcoming weekend in London. I didn’t want to stay with her, I wanted my friend to come with me. The flight attendant came to help me board the plane as I gave my friend a last hug. Although I looked back after being taken from her, I smiled, thinking about all the people and wonderful things that were waiting for me when I got off the plane. These details were what made the little island mine.

“Are you heading home now,” the flight attendant asked me while supporting my arm and helping me walk to my seat.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”

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.

Over the past five years the word “community” has gotten a terrible name. We talk about community programs and community organizers. Not entirely sure what either name truly means. Grants for everything possible to encourage community living, art that is reflective of a certain community and encouraging projects that will help a community grow. With all this pressure to think of people as communities one thing is for sure, a genuine community is extraordinarily rare.

Just about every major religion stresses the importance of community. Sharing your life amongst other people, your frustrations, conflicts, sadness and joy keeps living in perspective. The world becomes bigger than just you, yourself and your family. There is genuine concern for others that you share your life with and from those who share their lives with you, even without the binding of blood. As far back as anyone can remember, humans were meant to be communal people. Trusting each other, relying on shared resources and even conflicts in order to lead to the betterment of the whole. Living this way means that people know your problems, your strengths and weaknesses, every annoying and gentle part of you. Best of all though, the people you surround yourself with, over time, really grow to know you.

Many say that in the modern world we no longer need to be dependent on other people. But, this is not true. Perhaps physically it is absolutely right, most people can survive working from home and ordering groceries from the Tesco online store. Their food and the necessities of daily living will be supplied. I myself could not survive in such a manner, but of course, I am the exception and not the rule. But even if I could physically, be independent enough to cook my own meals, mind my own house, keep up with a job by living at home. I don’t think I could live, I would survive certainly, but looking at my life now the problems seem overwhelming. The only way to survive this burden is by sharing it with others. The truth is, mentally and emotionally I need to be part of a group of people who are willing to love me, put up with me unconditionally and even chastise me when I’m wrong. I’m not looking for parents so much as I am looking for someone to share my life with.

Of course within the past three years, I don’t think amidst all the craziness I would have been able to get by without the community that I can now recognize and find myself in. This of course might be the absurdity in organizations, grants and governing bodies trying everything possible to jam a community down the throats of its constituents. A group of people living together and relying on each other happens without most of us realizing it. That’s when sharing lives becomes a genuine and easy experience. Of course this means making a sacrifice. Admitting that my life is out of control and going absolutely crazy means that I can no longer lie to myself. It means that people hold me accountable to my actions towards myself, towards them and towards their families, so that I might grow, learn and thrive in a way that I may not be able to if I had all my needs met yet still insisted on living in solitary confinement. It means of course we grate on each other. But, overall, we have formed a community without trying.

There is an ongoing joke I have among my friends that one day I walked into my flat only to find that there was someone uninvited in my kitchen, another one using my internet and a third one lying down in my bedroom. During this discovery a fourth one came over explaining that his shower was broken and was only putting out cold water, wondering if he could use mine. I am lucky to have fallen into a community with women who bake every Saturday and men who drop by when they are in need of the internet or have found out that I have a broken toilet. It does mean that I have made a sacrifice and that the quiet moments are rare. I am challenged continually by the people who surround me, even on the days I would like to go home and avoid everyone. But this assures me that within my community not only do I never have the benefits of an empty house, I will never have the downfall of an empty life.

There is something immensely pleasing about running under the golden trees of autumn and watching the leaves fall. It is almost like the entire world for a moment, is showing off and becoming the absolute best that it can be. Often in the early evenings I take long walks and peer into the windows of warmly lit rooms. Inevitably, one sees families gathered around tables either doing homework or sitting down to dinner and on a particular November night; even though I am half way around the world I am reminded that this is the season to stop and give thanks, no matter where you are from, for the bounty that you receive either in the form of friends and loved ones who surround you or simply having food on your table.

Somehow Thanksgiving is always less precious than it’s stressed out holiday cousin of Christmas. You don’t hear over and over about the perfect Thanksgiving, the magical thanksgiving from childhood you always remember. Instead much of the family stress of making a day into some sort of idealized Rockwell disappears. We need only do one thing, and that is to be thankful, and while it should be the simplest thing to do, inevitably…it is not.

I sometimes think that Hallmark and other card companies must be incredibly frustrated with the holiday. They are still, despite their best efforts, unable to turn it into a manufactured reason to make money and increase their capital. There is no fairy or elf that comes along to sprinkle dust on you in the middle of the night and make you thankful for all you have been fortunate enough to receive. An image of such a creature inevitably sets me off laughing as he is somehow unimaginable. One being thankful is one action that no one can force upon you, nor can they magically impose a feeling of gratitude without your effort. Thankfulness is a choice, you choose to be thankful where you are and where you choose to be.

The duty of the holiday or the reason for the holiday is that an individual must be thankful for something, anything, and to someone. It could be that you are thankful to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for creating International Talk Like a Pirate Day; or you could be thankful to your mother because even though you are at the age of 45, she is still willing to clean you room. Be thankful to Buddha for laughing, or Christ for being crucified. What you are thankful for is immaterial. In this way the holiday is not distinctly religious, nor is it distinctly American as some social critics claim. Surely other cultures have much to be thankful for and find their own way to express gratitude to both entities or for such items. If one is unable to decide a single thing to be grateful for, then inevitably the very value of life comes into question.

A few years ago I shared Thanksgiving with a friend who absolutely dreaded the holiday. She insisted that it just seemed like pre-gaming before Christmas and one should simply celebrate the great holidays in December, leaving November to stand on its own. It’s easy to see this holiday as completely pointless; there are no gifts, there is no grand finale, and for the exception of the Macy’s Parade there is no common experience that unites the entire country together. Each family sits down to a dinner that is uniquely their own, be it a stuffed turkey and homemade cranberry sauce or macaroni and cheese. We spend time thanking each other because that is in many ways the most expensive currency we have and yet it is universal and our freedom to choose how those twenty four hours can illustrate our attitude about the things in life we treasure. If we cannot take time on such a day to be thankful, to stop and listen regardless of what goals are unmet and what desires we have that have been lost. What makes us think that we will ever be ready to receive the gifts of Christmas?

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 didn’t really have girlfriends until college. In high school I was far too busy and in many ways, far too miserable to trust anyone with my deepest darkest secrets. So it wasn’t until I went away to get a university education that I knew the magic of staying up late with popcorn and movies, sneaking scandalously when the boys were nowhere around, and enjoying a really good margarita. A girlfriend is someone you can not only do all these things with, but also allow yourself to let your guard down and allow yourself to be as girly, silly, and even scandalous with in ways that you would never do so in public company. After college we went our separate ways and now that I am a bit older, I’m realizing that it’s difficult to find new girlfriends.

Everything about a young woman’s world tells her to turn inwards. We go from spending Saturday nights at sleepovers or with cocktails and DVD’s to dates with a single guy that no one else is invited to. If we are lucky enough to fall in love and get married, the focus shifts from keeping up with our girlfriends to setting up a home and balancing the new adventures of living together while making ends meet and maintaining a career. Then inevitably come the children or the additional workload or both. Men get to go to pubs and have time together in which they drink and throw darts, but for women what exactly is a girl’s night out? Older girls will sometimes invite each other to what they call “girl’s night in” where they paint their nails and wear pink; having slumber parties that remind you of the teenage years. Men don’t need to be reminded of their teenage years; they never lost the ability to have “guy time.” But as women we go backwards, turning into the ultimate giggly girls and watching reruns of Sex and the City in order to feel not quite so juvenile. None of this is for me, I’m afraid.

Even if you fall in love with a soul mate and marry him, he will never be a girlfriend. Girlfriends watch each other grow up and listen to each other as they share insecurities about sex, child raising, hormones, all the little details in life that you wouldn’t dare tell anyone else. The world encourages girlfriends which are unreasonable; irresponsible even, spending money on clothes and unnecessary knick knacks. Being superficial and silly all the time shrinks the value of a true girlfriend until she is replaced by the faux girlfriend who is obsessed with a combination of men and handbags while having all their conversations over cosmopolitans. For those people who only have the “faux girlfriend”; the fake girlfriend, I often wonder what they would do with the problems that broadside me on 2 a.m on a Thursday.

Truth is, all my girlfriends have sprawled out over the globe and perhaps because of the distance, we have been forced to stick close to each other. More often than not, we make accidental phone calls to one another at two o’ clock in the morning, forgetting the difference in times zones. Sometimes those middle of the night phone calls carry the most urgent news and the deepest desire for a friend; not a husband, not a mother, but a girlfriend to listen to the situation. When the 2 a.m. phone calls are by accident, we bolt out of bed anyways, excited to talk to one another at last. And when the 2 a.m.’s come with an urgent need, we are quite used to disturbing our beauty rest and having a conversation with the people we value the most. Like anything rare, when a girlfriend passes by, you can’t help but drop what you are doing to see if she needs anything on her way.