It’s an unfortunate truth that there are some people who can’t get around without a little help. Especially unfortunate is the fact that I’m among that segment of the population. At no point have I made it a secret that I have trouble doing things like running, walking long distances, standing in place for long periods of time, or jumping. Those are all just something I deal with, like my difficulty remembering certain names or my instinctual drive to hoard pens and notebooks. Recently however I was told by a medical professional that one of the things I could do to help myself walk better was use a cane or walking stick. Considering how many people who share my condition aren’t able to walk at all, something as small as a cane might not seem like a big deal. My problem is that at the age of twenty-five I’ve lived the better part of a quarter century walking on my own two feet just to be told how much better off I’d be with a stick to lean on. That may be true, but it’ll take some getting used to as I weigh whether it’s my body or my ego that’s taking longer to adjust. A cane isn’t something you can use without people noticing, and it can change how people think about you.
There’s nothing wrong with needing a cane, a walking stick, crutches, a walker, or a wheel chair. Different people have different circumstances and different needs. That shouldn’t stop them from being able to go where they want and being able to travel with dignity. A person’s a person whether they can walk around on their own two feet or need to utilize another form of locomotion. Historically people like that were looked down upon and had to crawl around or drag themselves along the floor. In ancient times most people supported themselves by doing field work or some form of skilled labor, and there wasn’t a lot of room for people who couldn’t pull their own metaphorical weight. If you couldn’t contribute the way everyone else could you were seen as less of a person than everyone else. Being called substandard, being labeled a cripple, was a mark of great shame. Your mere continued existence would be seen by many as a burden on your family; after all, what is an extra mouth to feed that cannot contribute to the household but a weight dragging everyone else down? We live in a better age today, one where many debilitating illnesses can be treated, the conditions that underly various forms of disability are better understood, and some individuals with special needs are even capable of becoming Olympic-level athletes. That said, there’s still a bit of a stigma. Trust me when I say this, because even I’m occasionally reminded that this stigma exists. No matter how far we’ve come, no matter how many handicap parking spaces, ramps, automatic doors, or elevators are installed in cities and towns everyone still fears being known as a cripple or overcompensates when they find out someone has special needs. It can be as well-intentioned as offering someone a wheel chair despite them never using one the whole time you’ve known them or as rude as thinking someone with a disability automatically has the IQ of a gumball. People with special needs, whether our variation from “normal” human beings is physical or mental, make “regular” people uncomfortable in a special way, as if it’s something you could catch. We’re also unnerving in the sense that we can pop up in almost anyone’s family tree if the genetic dice roll a certain way and that none of us are exactly the same. It’s hard to stamp out ignorance or assumptions about things like that because what’s true for one of us doesn’t always hold true for the rest of us. We’re counted as a minority, but it’s hard to make it a part of our identity (at least in my experience) like a skin color or a nationality. For one thing, it’s hard to take pride in a trait that negatively impacts parts of your lifestyle and that science would cure if it could figure out how.
For the most part I’ve tried not to let my disability develop from an issue with my legs into a chip on my shoulder. I sang a song called “Walk Tall” (not the country song) at Music Fest in middle school and joked about how a special needs kid singing that as a solo felt like a sappy scene from the end of a movie. I yelled at my Society in college when they tricked me into sitting on a couch that didn’t exist and I ended up slamming down onto a concrete floor and taunted everyone during dodgeball for not trying to hit the cripple. Around Christmas I end some of my prayers with “God bless us, everyone”. When there are chores to be done I help out where I’m able and have started learning to step out of the way when I’m not. Twenty-five years is a long time, and it’s let me become familiar with my limitations. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve felt so wary in the past about using a cane or a crutch; using one of those in public would be an admission to the world that I have new limits and an announcement to society at large that I really am a cripple.
Part of the reason I’m choosing to write about these feelings now is to get them out into the world where I can deal with them rationally. I know there’s nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps now that I’ve bared that corner of my soul to an audience I’ll believe it a bit more. A secondary reason for this topic is to spread the news that it’s okay to lean on something if it’s to keep you from crumbling. I’d rather use a walking stick than shuffle through another communion service praying my leg doesn’t twitch at the wrong moment and spill the metaphorical Blood of Christ on my good Church clothes. How will I ever get better if I don’t listen to the advice from the experts I was praising a few weeks ago? Things like this don’t just go away if you ignore them or try to tough it out. Often it’s acting like that that makes things worse. Instead hold your head up high, do what needs to be done, and live your life as a person. The quirks in every body make us all different, but that doesn’t change our worth. We are all valuable, oddities or no oddities.
My life has been easier than it’s been for many people with special needs, but I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we’re people who just want to do as everyone else does. We aren’t automatically “so brave” or “inspiring” just for getting out of bed in the morning, and our lives aren’t constantly spent suffering or wishing we could be anyone else. We aren’t all just soldiering on while dealing with internal despair – there are some days I don’t even think about my disability or what I’d be like if it wasn’t in my life. Behind it all we’re just people, and I’m just like I was before. The only thing different is that now I use a cane sometimes.
The Archivist's Pen 