It happened again, yesterday. I was in a room full of strangers with a small group of people I knew personally or through my dad’s stories. Most of these people knew me, held me in high regard, would have cheered me on no matter what if I had taken the mike in my hand. My mum told me to choose a song I could sing here, in honour of a family friend who is going to move out of town soon for her college. She was excited, really looking forward to hearing her daughter’s beautiful voice win over yet another audience, trying to signal someone to make it happen. I panicked, yelled at her to stop, told her I wouldn’t do it. My bubbly self disappeared for a while there; mum was so confused I could feel it in her gaze that she was wondering what she did that offended me so much. Eventually I held her hand, she asked me what happened, and I told her: “this is a room full of people that are going to see my wheelchair before listening to my voice. They may be a close group for the hosts of this evening, not for me, and that just doesn’t help…I would love to sing if the opportunity presents itself, though, because I know you love it when I do.”
Thankfully for me, maybe not for my mum, the opportunity didn’t present itself after all.
I’ve been thinking about this since it happened yesterday. How did I become so self-conscious about my wheelchair when it came to singing? That was the one thing that wasn’t affected by my stage fright. I loved to sing when I was younger, I executed it almost perfectly every single time, no matter how significant the occasion was. I would fumble half the time I was supposed to speak in front of an audience; never a chance I would mess up singing. I’ve always been very aware that I write so much better than I speak. I was supposed to be the perfect girl who’s good at everything, and this particular fact did not sit well with this expectation…so I fumbled. But now, it’s not about being perfect, or even good. It’s about whether I will be seen as a person before I am seen as a person in a wheelchair.
I have tried to deny it, to only see the appreciation and not the meaning attached with it, to only focus on breaking stereotypes and never look back. I have tried to look past the back-handed compliments – you’re such an inspiration, I could never do it if I were you, I’d be too ashamed, I’d just run away at the sight of so many people…oops! Sorry! Did it offend you that I said “run away”? – and I have tried to just keep on doing, doing, doing. It doesn’t help, you know. None of it helps.
The people that see the wheelchair before me, they don’t know me that well, I tell myself. They don’t know I trained in classical music for five years, and classical dance for a few more, and the keyboard too. They don’t know how bad I want to correct their perspective all the time. They don’t know I knew how to swim since I was eight and I’d been trekking since I was three and I was learning how to ride a Bullet when I was fourteen. They don’t know I hate being called a motivational speaker, because it glamorises living a normal life so much – a life that is second nature to me, that they are living too, but they just can’t imagine someone with a disability doing it too. They don’t know how much I hate having to try and just do things even when I don’t want to, simply because they’re watching and will always evaluate. They simply don’t know.
How do you blame someone when they simply don’t know?
How do you expect them to understand when they simply weren’t curious in the first place?
How do you make peace with such chaos when you know it’s so “unacceptable” even though it’s just so human?
