Episode 60: I Don't Owe You Helplessness

TRANSCRIPT OF “I DON’T OWE YOU HELPLESSNESS”

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MALE VO [00:03]
This is Bad Attitudes.

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LAURA [00:20]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast about Disability. I’m your host, Laura.

My brainpan dredged up a weird memory, so, obviously, we’re going to talk about it.

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As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. My experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community but I am not the only voice.

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LAURA [01:45]
So, this memory is old. Like, just-out-of-college old. But, for some reason, my brain yanked it out of my subconcious fully fleshed. I assume the reason is so I could write this episode.

A couple years after I graduated from college, I was meeting a college friend for lunch. No big deal. I arrived at the restaurant early, as is my wont, and slowly progressed to get out of my car, purposefully taking my time to wait for my friend to arrive. An older woman (who was probably the same age as I am now, sad face) came out of the restaurant and asked if I needed help. She was the restaurant’s hostess. I assured her, “No, I’m good,” and continued dilly-dallying while I waited. She came out AGAIN and asked me AGAIN if I needed help. I reassured her, “Nope, all good.”

Let me reiterate, I was going slowly ON PURPOSE. I didn’t need to rush. At the time, I could have gotten my chair out of my car and put together in probably two minutes or less. I’m out of practice now, but that’s what happens when you have a global pandemic and you work for yourself from home and have nowhere to go. Things that could have slowed me down: Bad weather. Injury or illness. People watching me. Or, God forbid, people helping me. Specifically, I mean people who don’t know me and aren’t familiar with my chair or my methodology. The people who know me and don’t know how to help tend to stay out of the way.

Anyway, my friend arrived, I popped my chair together, and we went inside, where the hostess says to my friend, “She wouldn’t let me help her.”

[crickets chirping]

LAURA [03:32]
Did she expect my friend to reprimand me? Like, “Laura, you should really have let this woman who knows nothing about you or your disability to help you with your incredibly important mobility device.” With a stern wagging finger. The comment totally wrong-footed me and seeing as I’m writing a podcast episode about it 20-odd years later, I’m still pretty wrong-footed about it.

I didn’t say anything about it to the hostess or to my friend and we quite happily went on with our catch-up. But, deep down, I kind of wanted my friend to have said something. Something like, “Why should she?” or “She didn’t need your help.” Instead, we both sort of awkwardly laughed and let it go.

Realistically, I should have been the one to say something along the lines of, “If I needed your help, I would have accepted it.” But, I was barely out of college and still learning how to assert myself in the adult world.

It seems ridiculous, but this woman was at least mildly offended that I wouldn’t let her rescue me. Or maybe she thought my friend would have expected her to help me, but my friend well knew that I would have rejected such offers. Regardless, this person expressed distaste that I was disabled AND independent.

I’ve said before that if a disabled person rejects your non-disabled offer of help, let it be. We know what we need, and we know when we need to accept help. Even if we look like we are struggling, if we say we don’t need your assistance, accept that. What looks like a struggle to you may in fact be a finely tuned system. And, in reality, it may only look like a struggle to you because you don’t understand what you’re looking at.

That woman clearly did not understand what she was looking at when she saw my disabled ass constructing a wheelchair from inside of a sporty two-door car. To her, it looked more difficult than it was because she didn’t understand the mechanics of it. It wasn’t something she had ever encountered. It was easy for me because it was a system I had created. I can take that into account, but it doesn’t mean I have to accept her offer.

Disabled people do not owe abled people helplessness. We don’t have to let you be our saviors. We can be disabled and independent. Self-supporting. Self-sustaining. Does that independence look the same for every person? Absolutely not. Some disabled people need caregivers to help them live independently. Some depend on different types of services. Some rely on their families and friends. But they are still living independently.

Too many times non-disabled people try to force their help on disabled people because they cannot accept that a disabled person can succeed without intervention. The restaurant hostess wasn’t “forceful” per se, but she was passive-aggressively forceful because she asked MULTIPLE times to help me and then made it an issue by bringing it up to my friend. What’s worse is that, because she asked multiple times, I know she was inside the restaurant WATCHING me. Which is weird.

I can see it from this woman’s perspective. She sees me, slowly putting together my wheelchair, slowly getting out of my car, and it must look painfully difficult to her. Which is why I can forgive her asking more than once if I needed help. What I can’t really forgive, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is her saying to my friend, “She wouldn’t let me help her.”

Even though she said it light-heartedly, it felt like I was child about to be punished. Like I did something wrong by not accepting her help. I did nothing wrong.

I’ll say it again. Disabled people do not owe you helplessness. We do not owe you neediness. Picking and choosing the circumstances in which we accept assistance is our prerogative, just as it would be the prerogative of any non-disabled person. If you, as a non-disabled person, offer a disabled person assistance because you look at them and think, “There’s no way I would be able to do that,” your actions are not about the disabled person. Your actions are about YOU. You’re not actually interested in helping that person. The person you’re interested in helping is the imaginary you you’re envisioning in that situation. But that imaginary you is not who you would be as a disabled person. That’s who non-disabled you THINKS you would be as a disabled person.

Because disabled people — we’re fucking superheroes. We do shit you can’t even begin to imagine and we do it EVERY DAY. Stop projecting the weakness you perceive disability to be onto us. It’s not an accurate reflection of who we are.

One more time: Disabled people do not owe you helplessness. We don’t owe you meekness or weakness. We don’t have to deny our abilities and independence so that you can feel like a good person.

If we refuse your offer of help, just accept it. I mean, unless it’s just really obvious that something is wrong, just let us be. You have intuition. Use it. Listen to your gut and NOT to the preconceived notions you have about disability. 

Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.

[09:13]
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