My voice echoed off the concrete walls: “Yeah! I made it!”
Skating the half-pipe had just become yet another thing that no one could ever again tell me I couldn’t do. I’d pushed my limits and gone further than I had expected. In a single moment, I had conquered a challenge I’d been afraid of—not the half-pipe, but my own body. From that moment on, I knew that I could trust myself again.
I found that moment deeply satisfying. It was exhilarating to push through my fear. I think it’s probably like that for a lot of people, maybe for everyone. I’m not talking about a serious, irrational phobia, such as claustrophobia or a fear of snakes or something like that. What I’m talking about is a moment when you’re afraid to commit to something that you really want to do, and then you do it anyway. And it doesn’t have to be a physical challenge. Maybe you want to move to another city, or even another country. You’re hesitant to leave your life as you know it, but excited about the possibilities of this new place, so you pick up and go. Or maybe you’re thinking about changing careers, leaving what’s comfortable but boring or unfulfilling. You take a chance and you find new opportunities and a passion for what you do. You’re facing your fears and taking the leap. When you break through that psychological wall, it’s fun. It gives you a rush like no other. It’s a concentrated dose of life.
Could it all have gone horribly wrong? Of course, but that’s no reason to avoid the experience. There’s a difference between choosing to take a risk and wiping out, and having something happen to you that you can’t control. And they’re both better than just sitting on your ass playing it safe. If I go down a half-pipe and lose my balance and get laid out, that’s my fault. But if, as I’m starting my run, my board breaks or it throws a wheel—that, to me, is fate. You can’t control stuff like that. All you can control in those situations is how you react to them. Fate’s a funny thing. You can take all the precautions you want—check all your stuff, make sure everything’s tight, have a plan . . . but none of that matters if the ground falls out from under you. You can’t prepare for everything. You can’t control everything. Every once in a while you just gotta take a chance. You can’t sit there wasting your life waiting until everything is perfectly safe or controlled. That never happens. If you behave like that, you’ll never try anything new. So you gotta have faith. It could be faith in God, or in yourself, or in someone else, or whatever, but you gotta have it.
What matters is mustering the courage to leap—and being able to do it alone.
It can be difficult to know when you’ve had enough help and are ready to go solo. My opinion is that you should always push yourself to go further and work harder. Make your body and your spirit give just a bit more than you think they want to, and most of the time you’ll surprise yourself. Whether the challenge ahead of you is physical, mental, or emotional, I’ve always believed that we rise to the challenges before us.
Part of the problem is that the people around me haven’t always shared that faith. They all mean well, I think, but too many of them have no idea when to let me take care of myself. For instance, when I first came home to Illinois after finishing my rehab at Walter Reed, I invited people over to my house. A lot of them, instead of acting like my guests, started acting as if they were my hosts, there to serve me. Anytime I tried to leave the room to get something, one of them would jump up and run to get it for me. If I said I was hungry, they’d offer to get me food: “Do you want me to order some takeout? Or pick something up for you?” Some of them just walked into my kitchen, started cooking for me, and came back with plates of food. If I wanted to see them scurry like headless chickens, I’d point out that they forgot to bring me a napkin.
Before long, they were doing everything around my house: dusting, vacuuming, laundry, you name it. I couldn’t get at any of my appliances because well-meaning friends and family members were always there running them for me. Eventually, I didn’t even need to get up. For a while it didn’t seem so bad. If I had been the kind of person who was content to let other people hand him things, I might have stayed like this for years.
The problem is, if you get used to being waited on, there’s a price to pay. Sooner or later, the bill always comes due, and if you’ve gone soft while being waited on, you’ll be in big trouble.
No matter how lovable you are, even the most generous people won’t be your flunkies forever. They have their own lives and problems; they have school, jobs, and kids. One by one, they’ll begin to show up less frequently. They’ll all drift away, and one day you’ll call out for someone to bring you a beer and there won’t be anyone there to tell you that you’ve got two hands and four wheels, so you should go get it your damned self. And then what? You’re so used to people doing everything for you that you can’t do anything for yourself. What kind of life is that? You’d have no independence; you’d always have to depend on someone.
I first learned this lesson at Walter Reed. In rehab, a therapist will work with you for only so long. After a certain period of time, you have to figure things out for yourself. This is practical thinking at work. When you’re learning to walk on prosthetic legs, for example, you don’t want your therapist to help you up every single time. If you never learn to pick yourself up off the floor while you’re in the clinic, how will you do it when you’re out in the real world? Having too much help during therapy is actually counterproductive. The whole point of rehab is learning to live without training wheels. If you want your independence back, there is no other way to do it.
I’m not saying that accepting any help is a mistake. Only you can know for certain whether you’re getting a needed helping hand or letting yourself be coddled. It’s important to pay attention, though, because it can be very tempting to take the easy way when people keep offering it to you. Giving in to that temptation too often will only serve to undermine your progress and make you weaker, and that, in turn, makes you less valuable—both to yourself and to the people around you. Warning signs to look out for include moments when you ask yourself questions like What do I do around here? or Why does everyone think I’m helpless? If the thought of doing things by yourself—whether around the house or outside it—starts to seem too scary, that’s another red flag. If you can’t imagine leaving your house unless there is someone to go with you, then you’ve crossed the line from accepting help to being hobbled by kindness.
How do you keep from crossing that line? It can be as simple as opening a door.
When I’m in a public space, such as a shopping mall or a restaurant, I often have to deal with obstacles that most people take for granted: doors. For a regular person, it’s easy: you walk up to a door, push or pull it open, and step through. In a wheelchair, that process is a bit trickier. I need to figure out which way the door opens, and on which side the hinges have been placed. If there are double doors, I need to choose which one to use, and that can depend on which way I need to go once I’m on the other side, the obstructions I have to navigate to reach it, and whether there are other people coming or going at that moment.
All this might sound complicated, but I’ve had a lot of practice, so it’s actually not that big a deal for me. That said, if someone sees me coming and is nice enough to hold the door open for me so that I can just roll on through, that’s great. It’s just a nice moment of social courtesy, and I’m not some defensive jerk who gives people a hard time—“I can open the door myself!”—when they’re just trying to be nice to me.
As long as you know that you can do it yourself, there’s no harm in accepting courtesy and a helping hand from other people. It doesn’t make you any less of a person, or make your accomplishments any less meaningful. It took me a while to learn this.
Imagine, though, if I always needed another person to open the door for me, everywhere I went. Suddenly I’ve become a loser who can be stopped dead in my tracks by a closed door. I might end up sitting there all day, waiting for someone to come along. How lame would that be? I’d be ashamed to be constantly depende
nt like that on other people.
Learning to make your own way isn’t just about the little things that clutter up daily life. It’s also about being allowed to fail, to make your own mistakes without other people shielding you from the consequences. I first saw this in rehab, when my therapists ran themselves ragged trying to prevent me from falling. They didn’t understand that pushing myself past my limit was how I grow and learn—it was my way of healing. Their experience had conditioned them to see falling as a bad thing, because it might lead to a patient getting hurt, and it always resulted in them needing to fill out an incident report in triplicate. If I had to guess which one of those two consequences they were more worried about, it would be a toss-up.
What I had to explain to them was that I needed to fall, and I needed them to let me do it. They made a deal with me: I could push myself as hard as I wanted, as long as they could put down padded mats to cushion my landings. Knowing a good offer when I hear one, I agreed.
I believe that I recovered more quickly in rehab because I refused to be coddled. “No special treatment,” I said to my therapists. “Don’t let me off easy. I’m here to work.” My mom respected this decision, too. She did all kinds of things to help me; she was always there when I needed her. I like to tell people that I’ve made it on my own, but on days when I was barely holding myself together, my mom was there—running errands, getting rental cars and driving me around, sorting out paperwork, and generally making sure that I was staying positive. What’s important, though, is that she knew the difference between coddling and encouragement, and she never stopped reminding me to do what I had to do so that we could go home sooner rather than later.
Whenever I got frustrated or felt as if I’d hit a wall, my mom would turn the situation around on me. One time, after I had just started working with new prosthetics, I complained, “Mom, my new legs hurt.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but you’re gonna get used to ’em, just like you did with your arm.”
And she was always right. I guess it was a difference in point of view. I was seeing trees, but Mom had some distance, so she was able to see the forest. That’s why she was able to help me find my way back out of that dark place whenever I felt like I’d gotten lost.
At the end of each day, though, she made sure that I was still doing the work of getting better. She was there to help me, not do it for me, and she made sure I never forgot that.
In fact, the only person at Walter Reed who ever tried too hard to shelter me was my roommate, “Sunshine.” Whenever he saw me struggling to do something, he’d step in to do it for me, whether I’d asked for his help or not. Once he was involved, he wouldn’t let me help or even do part of the work, he’d just take over—which was never what I asked of him.
I guess he thought he was doing me a favor, but the truth is, he was actually holding me back by preventing me from learning things I needed to know. It was frustrating, but dealing with Sunshine taught me another valuable skill: how to politely tell someone that I don’t need their help. The key, I found, was to be calm, direct, and honest. “You know,” I said, “I really appreciate the fact that you’re trying to help me out, but I really need to learn to do some of this stuff on my own. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for the help, and I promise that if I need your help with anything, I’ll ask. But unless I get some hands-on time with this stuff, I’m never gonna learn to get by on my own.” I let him know that he was welcome to sit there, “supervise,” and watch me work, and I asked him to step in if he saw I was about to hurt myself.
That was all it took. From then on, he eased up and let me get my hands dirty.
This can work both ways, of course. I think we all know what it’s like to watch someone we care about as they struggle to cope with something difficult. The urge to get involved, to take over and save them, can be overwhelming. Even more difficult, though, is seeing a person you care about get weaker and start taking the easy way out. It might begin with little things, like asking you to do the occasional favor, or loan them a bit of cash “until payday,” or tell a white lie to cover for them, just to “prevent a scene” or save their pride.
In cases such as those, when you see that you’re being asked to coddle someone, you have an obligation—as a friend or family member—to say no. I’m not saying you should refuse every request for help. The time to become concerned is when you see it turning into a pattern. If you can predict each request this person will make before they actually say it, then it’s a good bet the pattern is already established, and it’s time to break it. You need to stand up and tell whoever it is that’s taking advantage of other people’s sympathy, “Knock it off. It’s time to grow up and start taking responsibility for yourself again.”
It won’t be easy. Breaking that kind of news to someone you care about can make you feel like a monster. There’s a good chance that no matter how diplomatic you are, they’ll get angry with you. They might even holler at you and tell you to get out and not come back. There’s nothing you can do about that. It might suck, but in such a circumstance, the person you’re trying to help needs the cold hard truth a hell of a lot more than they need another favor. If you really care about someone, be brave enough to call them on their bullshit.
Now, even though some of my examples come from my rehab, I don’t want you to think that I’m talking only about overcoming physical challenges. Independence takes a lot of forms: financial, creative, and emotional, to name a few. Making the transition from being a kid to being an adult doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it usually involves weathering some pretty major setbacks. Finding your first full-time job is a big step; so is moving into your first apartment, or buying your first house. Greater rewards carry bigger risks, though. When the economy turns to crap, any one of us can wind up out of a job on a moment’s notice, for any reason or even no reason at all. Sometimes, through bad luck or simple mistakes, money gets tight and bills start to pile up. These are real struggles we all need to learn to face.
It’s our parents’ job to teach us how to function on our own as adults in the real world. If your folks did their job right, by the time you leave home you should know how to balance your own checkbook, pay your bills on time, take care of your own home and car, and look after your own health. Sometimes, though, even that’s not enough. When you’re young and haven’t had much time to work and save money, it can be hard to scrape up enough cash to pay all the fees and deposits necessary to secure a new apartment, or to come up with the down payment on a new house and also pay for all the inspections and closing costs. In that situation, receiving a loan or even a gift from your family to help you get settled and start your own life as a grown-up is perfectly reasonable. That’s a helping hand, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, if you’re pushing thirty (or past it) and your parents are still paying your rent, you just might be a coddled brat. If you’ve got your first gray hair and someone else is paying for your car, you might be a modern-day princess. If you’re old enough that you can’t count to your age using just your fingers and toes, and you still collect an allowance, then pardon my French, but you’re a goddamned parasite.
Owning your life is about embracing the risks that come with freedom. If you let other people do the hard things in your life—such as paying your bills, for instance—it won’t be long before you start to believe, maybe subconsciously, that you’re not capable of earning your own money. I’ve seen people like this, and it’s kind of sad. They just float along from one codependent relationship to another, leeching off everyone around them while at the same time copping an attitude of total entitlement. If this sounds like you, listen up, because I have a news flash for you: the world doesn’t owe you anything, and neither do I.
Yes, I know that’s a harsh statement, but I think it’s better to come at a situation with directness and honesty, even when the things I have to say aren’t pleasant. The idea that I’m trying to get across
to you is fairly easy to sum up: A person should earn his or her independence through hard work and sacrifice. Childhood has to end sometime because the world needs grown-ups.
Why is being able to stand up for yourself and get by without help so important? If you can’t take care of yourself, how are you supposed to help make the world a better place for anyone else? I think the best, noblest thing that any of us can do is work to help improve the lives of others, in whatever way we can. That could mean volunteering to help feed the homeless or building homes for people displaced by natural disasters. It might involve helping to make sure future generations have clean air and water, or standing up to fight for the rights of people who are being treated unfairly. If those seem overwhelming to you, there are smaller things you can accomplish every day. Being a good friend. An act of kindness for a stranger. Just think of some time when you were having a shitty day and someone did a little favor for you, and what a difference it made to your mood. I believe that the best way to make a world we can all share is to care more about what can do for others than about what others can do for us. I’m all for making a profit and enjoying the rewards that come from hard work, but I think there’s more to life than bringing home more money than your neighbor.
People who can’t take care of themselves, though, usually aren’t in a position to do much for other people. A person who has been coddled becomes dependent; all he or she has been taught to do is take, consume, and demand more. How can people spoiled that way ever learn to give, sacrifice, and think more about others than about themselves?
This is why I’m such a hard-ass on this subject. It’s why I want you to always push yourself to work harder, to learn to get by on your own strength, wits, and resources. It’s the reason I want you to be the firm but gentle hand that guides your family and friends down the same path toward independence. Building a better world and a brighter future is going to take a ton of hard work by a lot of strong people.
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