I’m gonna second (again) what whiterabbit’s saying. I have been very irritated at times when I was merely sitting with a group of friends & a stranger approached, uttering,
“Wow. I’d just like to tell you that I really admire your courageousness. I dunno if I could deal with it if I were in your shoes”.
A comment by a complete stranger, in those words & in that situation, says to me:
“Wow…I don’t know if I could go on in this world if I had to live my life the way I believe that you have to live yours…And you have friends and everything!”.
Someone making that type of comment while I’m just being “normal” both makes me feel shitty and amazes me. What have I done that’s so courageous? Live? What was I supposed to do when I first realized that I was very physically different (and at a disadvantage, in some cases)? Lay down in a ditch and shoot myself? Hide under my bed?
On the other hand, comments like, “Wow! You’re really moving fast in that thing! You must be diesel!” make me feel good. If I’m doing something that requires a lot of effort (like pushing up a steep ramp), there’s a basis for admiration other than the fact that I haven’t chosen to be a shut-in. I’m doing something that requires a lot of upper arm strength, something that some other people might not be capable of.
This probably sounds very angry and bitter, but I’m not that kind of person. Ask anyone who knows me. As I said in my earlier post, I know that people mean well. They just ought to ponder whether their comments might sound condescending.
I’ve seriously been debating whether to post something like this. I can’t see any possible way to phrase it without sounding insulting, which is not at all what I mean.
There are similarities and differences between being tall or being black and having to walk with crutches or in a wheelchair. The similarity is that that’s who they are and no one can change that. The difference is that having crutches or being in a wheelchair is a disability. I don’t care to use whatever PC term is required to get around the fact that you have a handicap.
I mean no disrespect when I say that. I’m just stating a fact. How you choose to cope with your handicap is up to you.
There are some who don’t deal as well as you. There are some who refuse to rise to the challenge and have given up on their lives.
Blah blah blah, you say. “It’s my life. What else am I supposed to do, but live it?” But to those without that disability, they see what you’re doing as rising to a challenge just to go about a day normally.
I’m trying to put myself in your shoes. I’m thinking about what disability I have. I have asthma. It’s mild and really not that dibilitating, but it is a handicap. So I’m thinking “What if someone came up to me while I was using my inhaler and said how courageous he thought I was being for living my life normally.”
I thought about that for awhile. I’ve really never had it happen to me so I’m not quite sure how I’d react. I think I might actually laugh. To me it would be funny that someone would think I was corageous for just using an inhaler. I might think he was weird. Surely I would. But, at the same time, I think I might decide that what he said was pretty cool. It’s a pick me up for the day. I’m just living my life normally and someone else gets inspiration from it. I like that.
But that’s just me. Maybe I would change my mind if it happened every day of my entire life. Maybe I would scream out “just leave me alone!” like you want to. Or maybe I would feel more confident in myself because someone feels inspired by me. I truly cannot answer that.
and I can see my dad, who is in his mid-seventies, saying something like what was said to whiterabbit and not having the first clue he was offending her.
This is, as she states, why she was polite to him.
But I would think, if I had the orthopedic condition whiterabbit describes, I would get a little tired of having people define me by that instead of simply seeing another person going about her business.
I’d like to point out that Muhammad Ali is also going out and showing up at fundraisers and other public venues. If this man had come up to whiterabbit after she had presented a speech about coping with a disability on a college campus, then this would be a different story. But she was sitting around shooting the shit with her friends!
I agree, Ender, that these examples might not be the best ones, because it’s not really clear if there is any bad intent in whistling at a girl or saying someone should lose weight. The guy in the OP was clearly trying to be nice, as whiterabbit said. But here’s another example – what if someone said “It’s so nice to see a fat girl really keep herself up and look so pretty.” People (strangers!) have said things like that to me in front of other people, (meaning, I suppose, that it’s nice that I’m wearing a formal gown and make-up at the opera, instead of a housedress and flip-flops) and I honestly felt like lobbing a brick in the general direction of their heads. Which I wouldn’t actually do, even if the Met did keep a supply of bricks on hand for that very purpose.
The point of this thread, methinks, is not so much “don’t feel sympathy for people who face different challenges than you do” but rather “don’t walk up to complete strangers and blurt out the first personal remark that pops into your head.” In other words, what Kimstu said at the get-go.
(not “you” Ender personally, but the more general “you” meaning people at large)
[aside]
Thanks to Miller,, now whenever I see whiterabbit post, I’m going to think “hey, there’s the girl who is financing her college education through white slavery!” One meets the most interesting people online. Only for a moment, of course. 
[/aside]
Obviously, Ender, we are not going to agree here. If you’d be okay with this guy saying that to you – great. Fine. I’ve known a few people who would rip him a new one, though, and I suspect such people are in the majority. I have nothing to back that up with except a gut feeling, so I could be wrong.
I felt like I was being held to a lower set of standards on sight, and the fact that I’m in college means I have so far exceeded those standards that it’s so damn remarkable that it MUST be commented on. THAT is bullshit. Does that make it any clearer?
I can’t think of any way to explain it more than I, and some other people, already have. If people said stuff like this to me every day, I think I would have to stay home and out of sight, because otherwise I’d turn homicidal.
I wonder how much I could make if I did traffic in white slavery. Hmm.
I used to teach Deaf kids, and I can’t count the number of times I was told that the job must be “rewarding” working with “those children”… I’m trying to unclench my jaw just writing it…
I know people were trying to be nice, but it drove me nuts… The kids I taught were KIDS… Some were nice, some were annoying as hell… Just because they were Deaf didn’t mean they should be held up as paragons of virtue.
It was sort of “Sainthood By Association”… And it drove me NUTS…
SFCanadian