So one of my philosophies—and it doubles as one of my most frequent bits of advice—is that I think everyone should move away from whatever place they think of as “home” for at least a year. In that time, as you meet new people, you learn (or relearn) how to make new friends, take care of yourself, and find your way around a new place. You have no idea how many new opportunities can come from something like that.
I’m not saying abandon everything familiar forever. You don’t need to turn your back permanently on a place you like and people you love. I’m just saying have the courage to try something new and test your limits. Find out what you’re really capable of becoming.
A perfect time to try something like this is when you feel as if you’ve lost everything. When you’ve run out of options, and everything seems hopeless, moving to a strange place might seem like the last thing you’d want to do. But that’s exactly the moment when you’re most free. That’s your chance to let go of a life that doesn’t work and go make a new one that does.
I’ve gotten to a point where I like changing my setting every couple of years. I like getting a fresh take and starting over. It’s what I did when I joined the Army: I just threw myself into that, even though I had no idea what was going on, where I would be sent, or what I would be doing once I got there. Once I was in, I adapted and found my way, one day at a time. The knowledge I gained from that experience was priceless.
Then, when I woke up in Walter Reed, I thought, Well, I guess I’ll move home. I mean, sure, I had friends and family back in Rolling Meadows, but a lot of them had moved on, and I felt as if I didn’t really know anyone there—but I didn’t let that stop me. I went back and lived with my parents for a while. Before long, I knew I wanted my own place. I had no idea whether I’d be able to manage living alone, but I was ready to give it a try. So I left, made my own way, and learned how to live by myself in a regular apartment, just like everyone else does.
When I first started working for Quantum Rehab, I spent a lot of time at its headquarters in northeastern Pennsylvania. One of the first people I met was Henry, a stick-thin dude with spiky hair and some cool tattoos. He said to me one day, “Y’know, there’s this girl who works here who has blond hair with hot-pink highlights.” This came up because I used to love to dye my hair all kinds of colors. I was like a walking rainbow for a while. I’ve had green hair, red hair, blue hair, you name it. All the guys at Quantum loved it. They still ask me to dye my hair once in a while, but I’m kind of over it. To me, changing my hair color was about expressing myself and getting people to realize you can’t judge a person based on something as superficial as that. Just because I look a certain way, it doesn’t tell you anything about who I am. That was my whole reason for dyeing my hair. The fact that the top of my head looked like a parakeet didn’t mean that I didn’t know what I was doing or that I wasn’t serious or professional about my work.
Anyway, Henry told me, “You’ve gotta meet this girl, Kaleena.”
“All right,” I said. When I got into the office the next morning, I said to Henry, “Take me to this girl.” He walked me over to her desk. When I met her, she and I instantly clicked. We just understood each other right off the bat, and pretty soon we became best friends. She kind of adopted me and began opening up my social circle. I met her family and her friends. Her boyfriend rides quads, and he invited me to come out one Sunday and go riding with him on the back of his quad. Excited at the idea, I said, “Sure! Let’s do it.”
That Sunday we went riding up on the mountain, and we had a great time. After that, I said to one of my new friends, “I think I want to buy a quad.” I bought a quad and started going out on Sundays, riding the trails with all these people I had just met.
That’s how it happens: it snowballs. By meeting one new person, you meet three. Each of them brings three more into the picture. Before long, I was a part of this place, and it was a part of me. Just like that, because I was open to the possibilities in front of me, I had a new home.
Not being shy is another thing I’ve learned. I used to let people walk all over me when I was younger. To be frank, I was kind of a pushover. I give the Army a lot of the credit for helping me change that. My training taught me to be direct in my actions and to know that what I’m doing is right. Confidence can’t be taught but it can be nurtured. It’s a quality you can develop if you’re given the chance, and if you give yourself the chance. You acquire it through your experiences, by watching people and learning. It’s almost as if it’s the sum of everything else you do, an equation you solve simply by living with your eyes open.
I became truly confident when I stopped second-guessing myself. It’s good sometimes to ask questions, but if you’re always questioning your choices, you’ll never be sure of what you want, what you believe in, or what to do. I’ve learned to trust my instincts, and that makes me self-assured. It’s the key to everything else that I do.
Confidence is probably the single-most attractive quality in the world. It makes other people feel at ease, because they sense your faith in yourself, and they figure that if you believe in yourself, then they can believe in you, too. People like having something or someone to believe in. Understanding that simple human truth has opened a lot of doors for me.
Confidence is vital to many parts of life, but it’s never more important than when you’re trying to get a date. This was especially true after I got blown up. I wasn’t sure how to approach a girl. Would she ever see me as more than a guy in a wheelchair who could be a friend? Could she find me sexually attractive?
I was on my first trip for Pride Mobility and I was at one of our dealers’ stores. I was talking to a group of employees and I invited them all out to dinner. Well, there was this one girl who was really nice and cute, and I was talking to her most of the night. At the end of the dinner, I asked if she wanted to come back to my room to listen to some music. She did, and we actually dated for a while after that.
I have a lot more confidence with girls these days because I have a lot more confidence in myself. I know now that women can see me as a sexual man. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: sex actually got better after I got blown up. I’m not kidding. Sex with no legs is great. This might not seem like the kind of change that I would be calling “good,” but it really is. There are so many positions I can get into now that I couldn’t when my legs were in the way. The geometry is completely different and so is my center of balance, but it’s amazing how much more stamina I have now that my body weighs so much less. Maybe I’m not every gal’s dream lover, but I haven’t heard anyone complain yet.
Embracing change is all about being willing to learn about yourself. When you’re afraid of change, that’s fear talking. That’s your doubt. That’s your subconscious trying to hold you back because you don’t want to cope with failure, or disappointment, or rejection, or loneliness. But you have to push past that. Diving headfirst into change is about improving yourself, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts. Uprooting your life, or quitting your job, or ditching a botched relationship might seem like the scariest thing in the world, but it’s probably the greatest gift you can ever give to yourself.
Just to confuse you, sometimes change is not good. Changes that are designed to baby you or remove challenges that might help you grow are not what you should want. Push those sorts of changes away. If you find yourself facing two choices, and one seems really hard while the other seems really easy, it’s usually a good bet that the hard way is the right way.
For example, when I bought my condo in Rolling Meadows, my family and friends started talking about “adapting” the place to my “needs.” They were talking about lowering the countertops and cabinets, putting in special fixtures in the bathroom, that kind of shit. I said to them, “No, you’re gonna build this place the way you would for anyone else.” I didn’t want special treatment. I didn’t want anyone trying to make things easy for me. I wanted everything in my home to be normal. By keeping things that way,
I’m not coddled. I’m not catered to.
Thanks to that decision, when I’m out in the real world, I don’t find myself paralyzed by unfamiliar situations: “Uh-oh—there’s no curb cut here! What do I do?” I already know what to do and how to do it. I face basic challenges in my everyday life so that they will be familiar to me when I’m in public. So now I can go anywhere I want, whether it’s handicapped accessible or not. Once I got used to always doing things the hard way, it stopped seeming so hard.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who don’t need the lowered cabinets and curb cuts. People who genuinely need those things should have them and use them and not feel any less proud of who they are. I’m just saying that people who don’t need those bits of extra help ought to learn to do without them. If you can get by without small, coddling luxuries, it will only make you stronger and better prepared to experience more of the real world. You’ll work harder, but the reward is something you can’t put a price tag on: freedom.
I don’t understand why, but too many people I’ve met who are in wheelchairs but otherwise still fit (i.e., not completely paralyzed) rarely or never go out into the real world. There are a few people who I see outside all the time, pushing their limits, but for each one of them I know that there are tons of other folks in wheelchairs who don’t even leave their houses.
I know it’s partly because insurance companies won’t pay for any kind of mobility device that lets people go outside, because they apparently don’t believe disabled people need to go outside, and that’s an attitude we need to correct. In a large number of cases, however, it’s simply because those people are afraid, or because they’ve given up on their life. They dwell on what has happened to them instead of seeing how much they still have left to do.
Basically, they’re just rolling over and dying instead of choosing to get up and fight, and that’s not living—that’s just existing. Existing isn’t enough. We need to live, damn it!
I’ll leave you with this thought, and you can make of it what you will. Change can be painful, inconvenient, expensive, and upsetting. It might lead to good things, or it might not. A lot of us try to avoid change whenever we can. We like things the way they are, and we’d prefer that life not come along and mess up all our pretty things once we finally get them the way we want them. Well, too bad. Changes aren’t permanent, but change is, so you need to learn how to cope with it and make it your friend instead of your enemy. There is only one time when you can count on nothing in your life changing for you ever again, and that will be when you’re dead.
Embrace change no matter what form it takes—because it means you’re still alive.
7
THERE IS NO BOX
Memo to the world at large: stop telling me to “think outside the box.” What pisses me off about it is the assumption that I live or think inside a box in the first place. I don’t see the world that way, and I don’t think you should either. However, I ought to confess that over the past few years, I’ve told countless people to think outside the box, and in all likelihood I’ll use the phrase again many more times. It’s one of those shorthand expressions that people kind of get right away, but that doesn’t make it any less trite. If ever you hear me say that phrase again, remind me of this simple truth: there is no box.
The box is different for each person and situation, but in general it means anything that limits your perception, restrains your possibilities, or inhibits your actions. It might be a narrow set of assumptions about the way something works or what you are allowed to do. For some people, the box is a mental or physical handicap; for others, it’s a lack of money, education, courage, or any of a hundred other things without which they think they can’t succeed or be happy. It might be a set of rules, or a religious code, a dead-end job, or plain old fear. And they let these perceived limitations restrict what they can achieve. Some people realize what’s going on and resent it, like someone who becomes a lawyer or gets married because that’s what their parents want them to do. Others don’t even realize they’re in a box and seem perfectly happy within whatever limits they’ve accepted, like “Why would I want to do that? Men (or women) don’t do that.” Or “That’s not what we do where I come from.” It’s a shame. But the truth is that none of those things matter unless you think they do.
So, if boxes are bad, why do we let ourselves get shoved inside them? I think it starts when we’re kids, and the adults in our lives need to control us. They slap labels on us, call us good kids or bad kids, smart or dumb, athletic or clumsy, and that makes their lives easier. Maybe we let them because we’re hardwired to want to know where we stand in the pecking order, but I think it’s probably just because we all start out scared or confused or just hungry for approval. So we go along to get along, to avoid punishment or maybe just to fit in.
As we get older, the pattern continues. The world builds up one box after another around us, adding more labels and limitations to our lives until we’re nested inside so many of these shells that breaking free starts to seem harder than trying to escape from Alcatraz. Impossible though it might first appear, escaping from these invisible prisons is what we all need to do. We aren’t meant to live like this.
No one can put you into a box unless you let them. The only boxes that define the boundaries of your life are the ones you put yourself into, or that you permit other people to put you into. In a sense, each of us becomes our own jailer. What most of us don’t realize, however, is that we also hold the keys that will set us free. All it takes to be free is to see that the box isn’t real.
Most of this stuff is just custom. Some people take these ideas for granted and swear by them, but they can really be kind of random if you think about it. I mean, men used to wear wigs all the time. How did that happen? Now we make fun of guys who wear toupees. Customs change. They can change so much because there’s nothing real about them. Wear a wig, don’t wear a wig. What difference does it make?
There is no box.
Usually, this topic comes up when people ask me how I get through my daily life despite the injuries I suffered in Iraq. They see that I have no legs, and they ask me how I get around. “What if,” they ask, “you go someplace with stairs and no elevators? Then what do you do?” Some of them look at my prosthetic hand and ask me how I handle a fork and knife or get dressed by myself. When I tell them that I can drive a car, even one that hasn’t been modified with special hands-only controls, just a regular car, the same as theirs, they can’t believe it. I might as well tell them I’ve just cured cancer—I’d be met by the same blank, stupid stare.
What’s happening in those situations is that some people, when they first meet me, don’t really see me. What they see is the box that they assume I live in, the limitations they imagine must define and confine my life. Instead of a man, they see a set of injuries and a wheelchair and a paint-by-numbers war story. Other folks I’ve met are more up front about their assumptions. They give my one-armed, legless body a once-over and say, “It must suck having to do things a certain way because of what happened to you.”
I don’t get mad at times like that. I see it as a chance to share my way of thinking with someone. “No,” I say to them, “just because I do something differently than you do, that doesn’t make it any harder. It’s just a different way of doing it.” Most of the time, they get it.
Forgetting about the box is about learning to think bigger and see the possibilities in everything around you. Let me give you an example. Washing dishes was kind of tough for me. I have standard-height counters in my kitchen, and when I’d roll up to the sink in my wheelchair, I’d have to reach up and stretch to wash the dishes. It was really uncomfortable. One day, I had the idea to just jump up on the counter and the sink was right there. It was so much easier. To me, that’s (okay, I’m going to say it) thinking outside the box: being willing to believe that the traditional way of doing something might not be the best way or the only way.
To get to the next step—n
o box—you have to change your way of thinking.
Once I started changing my way of seeing the world around me, things began opening up. It was almost as if my horizon had expanded—my world got just a bit bigger each time. As new possibilities came into focus, I began to see that most of my so-called limitations were only in my head. The only thing holding me back was myself.
That was a breakthrough moment. As soon as I realized the box was just an illusion, it disappeared. I felt like a prisoner cutting myself free of my own chains. Instead of being locked inside a tiny set of assumptions about where I could go and what I could do in a wheelchair, I was standing on the edge of an endless frontier. I could go anywhere and do anything.
Nowadays, even though some folks still think of me as disabled, I’m often moving faster than the people around me. Whether I’m at work or out in bars or restaurants, I tend to leave my friends in the dust. I don’t do it to be rude. Most of the time I can’t help it. It’s just a simple fact: on a straightaway, wheels are faster than feet. Nine times out of ten, I’m one of the fastest travelers in an airport. When I first started using a wheelchair, I didn’t think that would be possible. I figured it would kind of suck to be in a wheelchair while scrambling through a crowd to make a connecting flight. And waiting for the elevator in an airport was such a pain in the ass, I figured out how to ride escalators in my chair. I’ve done this all over the country without any problem—except in Philadelphia. The last time I was there, it seemed the TSA agents were on the lookout for me. As soon as I cruised toward an escalator they practically threw their bodies in front of me: “No, no! You can’t go on the escalator!”
I said, “Look, I know it says ‘no strollers’ and stuff, but do you really think I’d be going for the escalator if I couldn’t do it?” I guess they were just worried about me, and I get that, but . . . guys, come on. I can do it. In reality, I move five times faster than your average passenger. So don’t feel bad for me if you see me in an airport—I’ve got nothing to complain about. Except in Philly.
No Turning Back Page 9
