You’re OK
I’m wheeling up a small hill near my flat, my headphones on, in my wheelchair with the front flywheel attached and my mobile phone in the holder in front of the chair. In this position I’m at my very strongest. I can wheel offroad on unfamiliar routes, can trek over 10k, can fly downhill far too fast for comfort, but just fast enough for fun. I’m early in my push when I feel a little pat on my shoulder. I’m a little startled and I pull off my headphones to see a guy gesture at the path ahead of me.
‘I’m heading this way anyway, I can push you if you’d like’
I’m met with the slightly awkward smile of a man who is clearly pushing past the usual social boundaries to be kind. He’s taking a step out on a ledge for me here. It is kind. And that I live in a world where strangers offer me help is something I just can’t get over. It’s truly wonderful.
But I’m on my daily ‘walk’ when this guy approaches. I realise I’m rolling, but that’s only because I can’t actually walk. This is still my regular routine. I want you to imagine you’re on your daily walk and some kind stranger taps you on the shoulder, gestures at the path ahead, and offers to push you.
It’s that weird.
And we both feel it. The awkward little ritual of thwarted assumptions familiar to me and surprising to him, begins to play out. When a well-meaning conversational partner is faced with just how distant their understanding of a situation, of the person they’ve approached, is from reality. When they realise how little of a cliche you are, and how much of a cliche they have just become.
It’s uncomfortable, but I do my best to reassure him with the thing I say to all who faux pas in this way.
‘You’re ok’
The one-off offer of help might strike you as odd, but you can chalk it up to one of those unusual but benign interactions you’ll tell your friends about later. But if it happened again on that walk, if it kept happening every time you went out for months and years, you might start to wonder whether there’s something up with your walking. You might start to become oddly conscious of it. You might feel strangely visible. You might look for what was apparently wrong with you.
This is the problem I’m facing.
Back when I was using my wheelchair for the first time I was weak and struggling and I could understand the offers of help. I looked vulnerable. I was. I’d roll inadvertently into roads, I’d slide downhill, and I’d fall right off the chair pretty frequently. When this overenthusiastic wheelchair user is splayed out like an upturned turtle, offers of help are totally understandable.
But now, I’m strong. After this friendly guy had offered help, and after I’d declined, I overtook him on the uphill climb. I refrained from stopping to gesture at the path ahead and offer him a push.
Now, in my strength and competence I’m struck by just how dissonant the assumptions about me have become. The preconceptions haven’t changed and people make them with such unconscious confidence. The guy tapping me on the shoulder wasn’t questioning whether I needed help, he was sure of that, but whether I would accept it.
And it isn’t just offers of help. I was in hospital for an MRI recently and the kindly nurse who walked beside me to the machine mentioned that her children ‘are still in secondary school’ with a tone that implied that she thought I was too old for children of a similar age. The woman and I were around the same age as far as I could tell but she was so confident that I was somehow much older.
Then there was the guy in the street looking to engage in some market research, clipboard in hand, who approached me with jazz hands and a musical ‘hiiiiii’ assuming I was much younger than I am, or perhaps assuming that I would have difficulty with language or interaction.
Then there’s the kind woman who assumed it must be my birthday because there was no space in her world even for the possibility that someone in a wheelchair might be taking her girlfriend out for her birthday.
Then last week I was out with a friend at a restaurant and the staff bringing the bill handed it to her, confidently assuming that she’d be paying tonight.
What is being reflected back here is a view of myself I don’t implicitly share, one that doesn’t match my experienced reality even remotely. In their eyes I’m old and infirm or I’m young and incapable. I’m in need of charity or receiving it. I’m suffering, helpless.
But I’m not any of these things. I’m far from helpless. I’ll take on a kissing gate. I’ll throw myself over the gap between the train and the platform edge. I’ll wheel myself to work, teach from my chair, wheel myself home. I’m a registered educational psychologist, a research director, I have a doctorate!..
You might detect, dear reader, my defensiveness. Asserting your self-image in the world takes effort when people don’t easily see you. In most encounters people make assumptions and sometimes they’re wrong given the unconscious biases that inform them. But the assumptions about me in my wheelchair are so deeply wrong, so confidently held, that I feel I have to challenge people just to be seen.
And they then feel guilty.
Faced with the wrongness of the assumptions they have made, people frequently feel bad about themselves. Well meaning people will make these confident assumptions fast right at the start of the interaction. There’s no time for me to inform their preconceptions. To expose myself in my authenticity before they’ve formed their beliefs about me. So when I do enter the interaction, start to speak, I sunder those preconceptions in a way that is very visible. And they feel guilty, sometimes mortified.
My instinct, then, is to protect their self-esteem, to be understanding, limitlessly forgiving, overtly happy, even apologetic.
It can be exhausting.
But I remind myself of their kindness and of the opportunity for genuine connection that can only flourish following their presumptions going up in flames. So we are genuine, we watch their expectations catch and burn, and we say that thing we say to protect them while they psychologically recover…