It’s one thing when it happens once or twice. It’s a different thing when it happens just about every single day, in every single opportunity for it to happen. It tells you something about how other people perceive you. They perceive you differently. You notice that all the “normal” people around you are going about their business unhindered by such perceptions. When it happens consistently enough, for years and years on end, it’s more than just random happenstance. There is a reason. I absolutely guarantee if you were in my shoes, these things would stay with you for much longer than “a few minutes”. Shit, it would only be “a few minutes” until you experienced similar behavior in a different context from a different person.
Because that is the part I don’t understand, that’s all. It seems like it’s a pretty big deal to you, which is something I don’t get. That’s why I’m asking. Like I said above, I’ll try to work on more concise language to use to ask about why people feel a certain way about things that don’t really seem like a big deal to me. I’m not judging you as petty or anything.
4 threads. 4 threads in 7 years. Hmm, I wonder what the percentage that is of the total number of threads I’ve started in that timeframe?
I understand that. But I encounter many annoying people every single day as well. Annoying people that annoy you every single day is not limited to people in a wheelchair.
Look, I get your frustration, really I do. But for different reasons, I went through this several times per day from age 12 to 35. Because I am a female. Some of them did it because they really thought they were helping. Some of them did it by rote because they’d been trained from childhood. And some of them leered as I passed in a way that made me feel sick.
I could chase them off with a truly vicious look, but that’s just not the person I have ever chosen to be.
So eat your heart out if you so desire. But my experience has been that if you truly accept that the gesture is all about them, it won’t bother you anymore. And it’s just not worth the raised blood pressure.
Why do you think it’s a “big deal” for me? Why is your mind leaping to “big deal” rather than “pet peeve that is relevant to this thread”?
Because you said this:
Hey, if you say it’s not a big deal, then fine. It’s not a big deal. My thinking what size of deal it is to you is not that big of a deal. 
Yeah you were using a relatively trivial example that hopefully people could relate to, in order to understand the main thrust of the OP. The seemingly willful ignorance in some of the posts in this thread are amazing.
Nothing I said connotes “big deal”. If that strikes you as “big deal”, then you might want to say away from the August rant thread in the Pit. All those explanation points and adjectives might give you a heart attack.
Except that not all of us are unhindered by perceptions. Not the same ones as are applied to you, but perceptions nonetheless. Just yesterday, a guy in a shop asked me if I was going to get somebody to put a flatpack together for me. NO! I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. Normally, I just let those things go, but yesterday it really pissed me off, thanks to your thread, Ambivalid 
Perhaps it might make you feel a bit less targeted if you realise that the rest of us are exposed to perceptions, and annoying ones, on a daily basis. Same desert, different cactus. Imagine being regarded as handicapped/incapable purely because of your gender and not because you are in a wheelchair… It works the other way as well… Somebody who LOOKS fit and healthy and strong might not be, but they’ll be perceived as capable of lifting some heavy thing, even if they’ve got MS or a bad back or whatever.
You may be carrying a full set of luggage, but we’ve all got our baggage to carry about with us, in the form of trying to deal with other people.
LOL, I actually don’t bother reading the “rant” threads, since most of them don’t really seem all that big of a deal
That is the best way for you to deal with such things. It is not the best way for me. Like I said earlier in the thread, it would cause more internal strife for me to accept the unacceptable behavior and just live with it. And please, if you will, delve a little deeper into the experiences you had in that part of you life that you are comparing to what is discussed here? I understand if you don’t want to share painful/private aspects of your life but it’s hard to even relate one way or another when you simply assert that you’ve experienced similar treatment.
And I do not actually think it’s always (or even often) action that is “all about them”. It’s more insidious than that. It’s an unspoken, subconscious belief that wheelchair users/disabled people are lesser, inherently helpless and always appreciative of help, even if they tell you otherwise. So the actions are protected from criticism or self-reflection because hey, they didn’t mean anything but to be helpful. Right, but that honest kindness is founded upon wrong beliefs.
If you don’t mind, can you explain why someone holding a door open makes it more difficult for you to enter a building than if you just open the door yourself?
I want to stress, once again, that this is behavior that I have experienced literally thousands of times in my life. Thousands. And I’ve talked about it here a handful of times, at most. The overwhelmingly vast majority of these incidents just bounce off me, eliciting no response whatsoever. But there is both a cumulative effect and a limit to the degree of blatant mistreatment that I will silently endure. AKA I “pick my battles”. My gf did post once or twice in this thread. She experienced a form of this behavior for the first time when she was with me somewhat recently. And while it infuriated her, I almost didn’t even notice it because it was so common that it didn’t even stand out to me.
Weirdly, what you describe in the OP used to happen to me a lot. I’m not handicapped. People seem to want to open doors for me, even if I don’t want them to. Even when I ask them not to. Sometimes I’m tired and they’re holding the door open ahead of me. I don’t feel like rushing to get to the door. I don’t like ducking under them to get in the door.
There was a certain door at an establishment where this happened so many times that I’d wait outside until there were no people around to head to the door.
It used to bug me like crazy. I used to feel singled out sometimes. And of course, it wasn’t helping me, and it was making them feel better, so the injustice rankled.
Looking back at it, I think of it this way. People aren’t thinking about other people. People are thinking about themselves. People generally do things based on their conditioning. Many people are conditioned to do things like open doors for women, disabled people, children, etc. They don’t change their thinking based on the moment or the situation.
Also looking back and thinking of myself on the other side, it is a bit of an awkward dilemma in any case. If people don’t help out those people that society has conditioned them to help out, they can receive criticism as well.
I’ve often heard people chiding other people to ‘hold the door open for her’, trying to teach people manners.
The thing about correcting one particular person is that person has no idea that it happens often. They only know that one interaction, so it’s probably bewildering to them, and nothing is really gained.
Answering the question in the title, there is no how anyone ‘should’ feel. People feel how they feel. But I do think this, dwelling on the resentment makes the feeling worse.
On preview: TruCelt has posted a somewhat similar experience to mine and got refuted, but since I spent the time to write this, I’m posting it. Reading your most recent posts, I do think it’s odd that you ask how other people would feel in your place and then tell everyone who tried to relate that they can’t possibly know how it feels to be in your place.
I’m wondering how many people who disagree with Ambivalid’s reaction would think differently if a guy offered to give an woman a shoulder rub to “help her relax” and does it anyways despite her protestations.
You might want to try reading through the thread. This has been asked and answered.
Right? It all comes down to “No means No”. It doesn’t matter what the offer is, if someone says no, you need to respect that.
How do you know what they feel inside, and what their “true motivation” is? This man disrespected your explicit request, but how can you know that it didn’t actually intend to be helpful, even in a misguided way?
As for “making himself feel good”, isn’t it ultimately the reason why we all do nice things, like, say, giving money to a charity or whatever?
As for “putting you in your place in the social hierarchy” : such an idea wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind. I assume that there might be people who indeed want to put down handicaped people, but I doubt that it can be terribly common. Being “paternalistic” (for lack of a better term) I can see, but “put you at your place in the hierachy” I can’t.
OK, now I remember that some time ago, you wrote that as a kid, you would have mocked handicaped people, or something like that. I was puzzled by that statement, and asked if you were serious or if I was being wooshed. Now, this thing about putting people at their place makes me wonder if you used to despise handicaped people before becoming one, and if so, if you aren’t projecting.
Oh yeah. This:
Well clearly, a person who can’t open a door for someone without blocking the door is a moron. You should be complaining about morons that don’t know how to open a door for someone.
Is opening a door for someone physically touching them in some way?