I am such an inspiration

My whole life I have been an inspiration. Oh, I am so incredibly great and I am so amazingly able to do all kinds of things all by myself. I don’t need all the help that I seem to need. I know, because people have told me this my whole life. From certain members of my family over people I know from different walks of life to total strangers. They all tell me basically the same thing, ‘you’re such an inspiration’ and there seems to be no need for them to explain why that is so, it just is.

I particularly like the guys on the commuter train who pat me on the head and tell me how great it is to see someone like me and what an incredible inspiration I am to them… because total strangers know these things. I usually tell them that it’s good to see someone like them and how glad I am that they made it out of bed, and when they stare at me baffled I tell them that I know how hard it is for someone like them to perform such a difficult task. Most of them walk away either shaking their head or with a scared expression on their face that I so far have been unable to decipher.

But back to me, that is what this is all about.

I am categorically a brave soul. I touch on all these people lives – or should I say, hearts – merely by being alive and by going about my daily living, going to the store, eating out or taking the local commuter to where I need to go – or when I perform the amazing task of using a lift to get into my van, after all it does have several buttons (and to those who know me it’s no secret I don’t always manage to push the right one)

I bring a smile to people’s faces as I pass them in my daily routine – if I could only get paid for being so heroic and valiant.

But what I lack in income from this awesome life I lead, I get back as attention. People look at me with that smile that to some might seem condescending, a smile that I know they think is a gesture of friendliness and gratitude. Not so much because I am me, I don’t think most of them care who I am as a person. But I do know what I am to them, I am such an inspiration – not just an inspiration, but such an inspiration.

So why do I think their smiles are gestures of gratitude? I know because it is human nature. Aren’t we all grateful for who we are when we see those less fortunate than ourselves? Don’t we feel just a little bit better about ourselves when we are able to mirror our own life in their misfortune? Guilty as charged, I do. I just can’t help it, or maybe I can but it takes a lot of willpower and personal strength. No matter how I lok at it, I am still happy I am not a sub-Saharan African, deaf, gay woman with AIDS and a serious limp. I admit it, I feel thankful for not being her. I am glad to have my crippled life where I can go out in the world and be an inspiration.

I know you want to ask now. Do I know a sub-Saharan African, deaf, gay woman with AIDS and a serious limp? No, I don’t. And if I did she I would never call her an inspiration to me. I mean, what had she done to deserve it just by being a sub-Saharan African, deaf, gay woman with AIDS and a serious limp? If she had done something amazing then, yes, I might consider admiring her. But then I would admire her for what she’d done, not for who she is. What she’d done is above and beyond her being disabled (or gay or a woman or sick, for that matter) If she had created a living for herself and she now owned a thriving business, I would say ‘good for her’ but not because of, or in spite of her obvious difficulties, but because she was an amazing person who had accomplished something for herself, regardless of the hand she’d been dealt by fate.

Why should I look at that woman through her difficulties instead of looking at her as a fellow human being? Suddenly she disappears and what I am looking at is her circumstances. She becomes a symbol, an object that I can use to mirror my own life in and feel good about myself. She becomes reduced from being a person with a disability to being her disability.

She becomes the inspiration for me, an inspiration that lives outside of me, an inspiration that takes on its own life in my thoughts and my actions. Suddenly she is no longer a person but some sort of representation of how I would like to live my life in a perfect world – except I really don’t want that, because that would mean that I also would have to bear the cross of her disability. And despite my elation about being an inspiration, I know that is not what I want.

So instead she becomes a beacon of hope that things are good in the world. I have my quiet little life that I can live without too much trouble and thank God it’s not me who is that sub-Saharan African, deaf, gay woman with AIDS and a serious limp.

But at the end of the day, who am I to know whose life is more or less difficult than mine? And that is what really curdles blood when I hear: “Dear me, you are such an inspiration to me!”

ETA: I just found this that puts the subject in a more serious light:

http://badcripple.blogspot.dk/2013/04/shane-burcaw-laughter-is-not-always.html

I have to say that ‘Badcripple’ is one of my great inspirations and it was fun to beat him to a subject. I don’t think that is going to happen too often.