Hey Little Parasite Stop Eating My Awesomeness

I pride myself on being able to meet adversity head on.  When someone tells me I can’t (or shouldn’t) do something, they might as well sit back and enjoy the entertainment of watching me try to conquer the “impossible” task at hand.  To say I’m stubborn might be a bit of an understatement.  I am that person that will (and have) eaten ridiculous food combinations because someone dared me I wouldn’t – I just had to prove them wrong. 

Now there are those times when I can’t exactly envision myself succeeding at the task at hand, but I try anyways.  For example, it was a winter night in Boston, Massachusetts when my church youth group was visiting a college up there.  This particular night we were going out into the city to do touristy things and what-not.  The plan was to take the T, the Boston version of the subway.  What we didn’t plan on was the fact that the T station we were boarding at had no elevator, just two rather large flights of stairs.  At the time I was in the middle of my freshman year of high school, that put me at about 14 years old.  I had done lots of stairs in my lifetime, but it was always my father lugging me up and down.  My mother was a chaperone on this particular youth group trip but she’s not one that would be able to help with my chair in this situation.  The first station we stopped at I got out of my chair and went up the stairs with my mom’s help while one of the guys in our group lugged my chair up the massive flights of stairs. 

Unknowingly our group had picked a night that the Boston hockey team or something had won a game, thus leading to city wide partying.  The trains were packed, for people in wheelchairs it was a nightmare.  At one point my mom, myself, and one of the students got separated from the rest of the group.  Literally we looked to the other side of the train tracks after getting off the train, and there across the way stood the rest of our group.  Luckily my mom had gone to college in downtown Boston and knew her way around, but that didn’t make those cobble stone streets any smoother, the T stations any more accessible, and the weather any less rainy and frigid.  

As we wandered around those bumpy cobble stone walks freezing and slightly damp I began to get just silly.  You’ll learn that when I get nervous, scared, overwhelmed, etc. I laugh.  I laugh at anything, and I will a lot (probably to the point where people could really question my mental capabilities and not be overly stereotypical).  I started to see that yes, there are some definite unforeseen challenges, but that doesn’t have to kill the whole night.  Yes, there were certainly times that I didn’t think it was even worth it to continue on with our tour, and wanted to just head back to the college and crawl in bed.  Yes, I may have shed a tear or two going up those steps wondering “why am I even trying this?  People in wheelchairs don’t do stairs for a reason, this is dumb”.  The look on the T station manager’s face when he saw my chair go up the stairs was priceless.  I remember him yelling, “You can’t take a wheelchair up there! That’s not allowed”, to which the student carrying my chair said, “Watch me”. 

For someone who’s all about proving people wrong when they say you can’t do something, I have a pretty hard time proving myself wrong.  I’m great at tackling challenges when I have to, when I’m in the moment and I need to do something I normally would think I’m not capable of.  However when it comes to goal-like challenges I become my own buzzkill.  Take this blog for example: I love the idea of sharing my story with others, and I feel like maybe I can give those who are disabled a voice that screams “Hey, we’re just as awesome as any able bodied person out there”.  But when I think about how small of a fish this little blog is in the great sea that is the internet, it’s easy for me to feel like there’s no point to it.  Now I know that I can do anything I set my mind to, I just need to shout “Watch me” to that nasty little parasite we call self-doubt.  And it is just that, a parasite.  It feeds off you and slowly kills all your hopes and dreams. 

Sometimes I need to remind myself that I can climb those stairs, write that blog, be that voice, and achieve those dreams.  Anyways, I know that I can do all things because as long as I’m following God, I know full well that He will work it out.  I also know that I’m fairly smart, and decently creative when it comes to figuring out how I’ll do the “impossible”.  With all of that, combined with the best family and friends a girl could ask for what more do I need?  Nothing… well except a good cup of coffee to get me going in the morning.