Rainy Day
The weather doesnt discriminate. It’ll get anyone wet, disabled or healthy!
About Me
How many quadriplegics does it take to live a full and productive life?
Just the one.
How many fully-able people does it take?
Also just the one. But you have to want to do it.
Here’s the thing about being a C-1 quadriplegic. It’s not the whole I-can’t-use-my-body-and-I-need- a-machine-to-breathe-and-an-assistant-to-poop part. It’s not the whole utter lack of privacy or personal space that comes with needing round-the-clock care in case something goes wrong and I might die part. It’s not even the “Wow, sitting in the same chair for 30 years even if it’s pretty high-tech and moves on its own gets really boring sometimes” part.
It’s the pressure. We’re all born with this pressure to do something. To grow up and kick ass at a job, maybe raise a few great kids, leave the world a little better than we found it. To make money or write a poem or run a little restaurant people talk about when new people move into town. Hell, maybe just to party hard enough that your friends smile thinking about you a few years down the road.
We all have that pressure, all the time. And it doesn’t stop when suddenly you can’t use your arms, legs, privates or lungs. Sure, people are nice about it. Nobody expects you to go cure cancer or get married and have three-point-five kids behind a white picket fence in the suburbs. Not even you expect you to go win the Nationals in Argentine Tango (thanks a lot Tim Ferriss).
But the pressure’s still there. The pressure to have been something more. There’s a sense of loss that comes with it once your physical ability to do a lot of that is gone, but the pressure remains.
It can be easy to give up under that combination of loss and pressure, to listen to the excuses and amount to nothing but a skid mark on the toilet paper roll of history. That’s true whether you’re a quadriplegic or a fully-able person who’s met his or her own share of troubles along the way. My body is in a bad way, but I was lucky with the family I was born into and with the friends I’ve made on my own. That’s a blessing I know not everybody else has.
That blessing, combined with some traits my parents taught me from when I was still young and able, have combined to let me live something approaching a normal life. I’ve travelled, been married, read, gone to concerts, made friends, lost friends, gotten involved and maybe changed the world a little bit for the better. I hope that hearing my story might inspire a few people — able bodied, disabled, or someplace in between — to do more than they believe they can.
So, here’s my story.
