All this stuff about how people react to jamie is getting to be a little strange to me. I think that jamie’s feelings about these interactions are to be respected because he is in a situation that is not easily understood by others. But the other side of that coin is that people interacting with jamie are also in a bit of a awkward situation. I think perhaps cutting a little slack both ways is in order.
And some of this stuff is kinda a “had to be there” situation. For instance, in the situation jamie describes in this thread, I cant know without having witnessed the encounter just exactly what my opinion would be on the situation.
The guy might have been giving you a totally condescending response, or it could be something else. I just can not know from **jamie’s **description here of the event. So I reserve any judgement about either or both of the parties involved.
I am disabled myself but not in a way that would be as visually apparent as **jamie’s **situation. I just try to cut people some slack on their reactions to me because I know it is a tricky social situation for all parties involved.
I’m can’t exactly describe where I was going with all this so I think I’ll end it here.
The guy’s statement DOES seem to be very patronizing. I always say “Are you doing OK by yourself there?” when I see someone who seems to be having difficulty. In most cases, they know exactly how to deal with the situation, and say “I’m OK, thanks” and that’s the end of it. If they need help, they can tell me. Otherwise, I don’t want to imply that they’re not capable of managing their activities.
The guys reply is typical for something beyond their own ability, such as you might hear watching someone rock climbing. You don’t hear things like ’ you, sir, are particularly agile’, you hear ‘way to go champ’.
Like it or not, you are preforming great feats, probably far above most people can do, my suggestion is get use to it and thrive off of it. A thumbs up and cheering on comes with excelling and overcoming. The more you strive to overcome this the more you are going to get.
But you often viciously attack anyone on this board who doesn’t say what you want to hear. You don’t allow people to disagree with you, as competent adults often do.
Yeah, the guy was a bit of a dick, but frankly, if your biggest problem is people being overly and awkwardly kind to you out of the blue, you’ve got a pretty good life there.
And to answer the question of OP, I do believe intent matters. It may not make all the hurt go away, but it goes along way with me if a person was inadvertently rude due to ignorance or style, than if their intent was to hurt.
So yeah, intent does matter.
While I am not in a wheel chair, people have said stupid, insensitive crap to me as well. If I know that it wasn’t intended to hurt, I can feel better a whole lot quicker than if they meant to.
Well, I sure believe him - my spouse gets reactions like that fairly frequently and arguably he’s not as disabled as Jaimie (spouse does not use a wheelchair, but he sure does walk funny). People have weird reactions to the disabled, as well as insensitive, rude, and other reactions.
I think Jaimie may be getting extra because he’s an unusual sort, in that his upper body is extremely fit, strong, and well-developed. Not only are a lot of people not used to dealing with the disabled at all, but someone who’s a combination of disabled + elite athlete/bodybuilder just makes their gears seize up.
I think my reaction to Jaime in real life, given how his upper body looks, is that he shouldn’t have any problem whatsover getting himself around (barring trying to roll his chair upstairs or other true impossibilities) but some people just see the chair and don’t look at the rest of the person. I’d look at Jamie and just assume this is someone who’d have no problem transferring from chair to somewhere else, but that’s likely because I’ve been around some disabled folks. Not everyone has.
Again, it’s hard to say what all went on here - was the man’s tone condescending or sarcastic? Was he sincere? Was this partly Jamie’s hair-trigger offense button? (and yes, Mr. McGarry, you do have a bit of a chip on your shoulder).
Me, if I see someone disabled and I’m not sure if they need help or not I usually say “Let me know if you need help.” then just leave it to them to either do it on their own, ask for help, or give up. As far as I’m concerned, that applies to disabled kids as well as adults. But, obviously, not everyone is like that.
I get the feeling (and I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong) that as much as possible Jamie wants to be treated as an independent, autonomous adult with concessions made to his disability only where actually needed, but he wants them NOW.
I will say that I would prefer him venting on the internet to biting people’s heads off in public. I get the feeling he’s a bit confrontational - but that probably pre-dates him being in a wheelchair. Really, that sort of aggression is not at all uncommon in serious athletes, that annoying quality is probably connected to the trait(s) that make him a competitive body builder.
You are bent on taking your anger out on society no matter what they do. The man was hanging on everything you did just waiting for the opportunity to help you out if you needed it. You did not and decided to get mad at his concern. If you needed help and he did not offer, you’d be mad. If you needed help and he helped, you’d be mad because he did not do it right. You will always find a way to put your situation on the outside world.
Just a idle question, jamie. Are you newly disabled, or is this a lifetime thing?
Because it’s the latter, I would think your skin would be a tad bit tougher than it is. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your feelings, but your reactions aren’t advancing understanding. No, you don’t have to always be in “teacher” mode…and as a black woman, I know what it’s like to have to field crazy questions with calmness and understanding. But eventually, if you intend to not go crazy yourself, you need to develop some perspective on the issue and just let shit slide. Of course, I don’t know how much shit you have to put up with. Perhaps I too would be blowing a gasket if I had to put myself in your shoes.
But your OP reminded me of something. One day I went to the grocery store. For some reason, when my mind is not fully connected to my body and does the “Let’s pretend we have Parkinson’s Disease” routine, it often happens at the grocery store. I think it’s because of all the stopping and starting and turning. Anyway, I was having great difficulty walking. My feet felt glued to the floor and every step was like walking through hardening cement. As usual, I wasn’t really embarrassed or concerned. Inwardly frustrated, perhaps, but I knew I didn’t have to be in there long and that soon the difficulty would ease up.
There was a guy in a motorized grocery cart in one of the aisles. As I slithered passed him at a snail’s pace, he touched my arm and said, “Thanks so much for walking. You’re an inspiration. Don’t give up!”
It was the first time I had even considered that a physically disabled person would be able to relate to me, because I had never considered myself physically disabled. Just insane in the membrane.
And I still don’t know how I feel about it. What was his intention behind giving me the thumbs up? Was it to pump me up, like the guy in the OP probably was doing? Was it to say, “I feel your pain and I’m proud that you taking it to so well?” Was it just to say, “Hey, I’m disabled just like you are! We’re twinsies!” I don’t know. I guess it’s just better to assume the guy meant well whatever his motives were and NOT to take offense. Save that energy for something that really is offensive (like the guy at work who asked if I was drunk when he saw me struggling to walk, rather than asking if I was okay).
One thing I learned in college was that everyone has something that makes their life uniquely hard. A group of us girls were standing around and it occurred to me that we each had something really hard in our lives that no one would realize by just looking at them (one friend had her father, brother and two uncles commit suicide due to schizophrenia and was terrified to have children in case of mental illness, another was sexually abused and pimped out by drug dealing parents, etc). So while I may not be in a wheelchair, and the specific hurts that go with that, I think many of know what it feels like to be marginalized, assumed about, condescended to, insulted etc. The specifics may differ, but I thinks many of us share more experiences in common than you might give credit for.
What that made me realize is that I am better served giving people the benefit of the doubt. Not that you have to be a doormat, or take true offense or insult, but sometimes people have stuff in their own life that you might never realize. Maybe this guy has a family member with a disability who struggles and was genuinely pleased to see someone so independent. Maybe he has overcome something in his past and words of encouragement meant something to him. Maybe he’s just naive, but well meaning. If you really had to let him know that for you those words were offensive, perhaps there is a way to communicate that honored the intent of what this gentleman was trying to do.
IMO you ARE being overzealous and you are NOT doing it with the proper perspective.
You are ruining, if you already havent ruined it for yourself, the one thing about this place that could very special for you and maybe even unique in this world.
The SDMB is very special place in the internet world. It not overly specialized or overly censored or overun with idiots/spam/hateful people/youtube like commentary.
Spending time here you find out what various posters “think” and “know” about all sorts of topics from the mundane to the strange to the important. You get to know them by the important measures…what they think and how they act and what they do (here and in the real world).
Then, eventually, you often find out the other less important stuff about them over time. Like they are black or gay or poor or handicapped or abused as child or a rape victim or a widow or have a mental condition or didnt finish high school or were a drug user or petty criminal or have batshit crazy parents/relatives/kids or a hundred other things that generally arent considered a “social plus” (for lack of a better description). The kind of things that society in general judges a person for and/or at least makes assumptions about or is unconfortable with. And, I highly suspect these posters do tire of going through the real world with these labels leading the way or significantly influencing their day to day social interactions.
But, as posters, most of them have managed to avoid that problem when coming here to be a member of the community. They start posting about their favorite cake recipe or get into a big debate about God or tell some funny story about something in their childhood. They get to be known for who they are first. Eventually, when the time is right, they might tell you about their "label’. And eventually, they might REALLY tell you about their life with their label and what it means and how they feel about the whole issue (in the appropriate time and place). Or maybe they NEVER tell you about that one thing they get tired of in real life and just leave it behind to enjoy their time here totally unfettered.
What this all means is a random poster like me gets to know someone for who they are. Then, eventually I find out about label XYZ about them. But by that point, to me they are just the cool guy who loves surfing and for some odd reason George Bush too (oh and they happen to be XYZ that I may or may not remember at any given moment).
You’ve done and are doing the exact opposite. To me you’ve already become the angry wheelchair guy who mainly posts about his handicap. When I see any thread by you thats the first thing that pops into my mind. And, I generally don’t want to pop into a thread by you either because of that.
Again, IMO, you are ruining you chance to be defined by something OTHER than your wheelchair here with your zeal. Living the life you do in the real world I’d think you’d jump at the chance to not have it define you here as well.
I would agree with billfish678. On the internet, you get to control how you present yourself and how you are perceived without being limited by preconceived ideas based on your age, appearance or limitations.
That being said, the OP is more of a Pit thread kind of thing.
I have to wonder about the expectation that you would be asking for help, and your seemingly negative attitude about that. I’ve dealt with some people in wheelchairs before, and waited quietly while they did their thing, only to have some of them get pissy with me about “can’t you see I need help?” and being upset that I didn’t offer it. Others get seriously upset if you DARE to offer help before they ask for it. So like this guy, my reaction is to sit quietly, watch and wait for the request for help, and then gauge whether or not I’m interested in helping depending on the amount of hostility thrown my way.
Beyond that, yes, he was condescending and patronizing.
Next time smile broadly and say “Oh hey, so did you!”
Now see, the part I bolded I think is a terrible,uncivilized way for the situation to be handled. But its not Chimera’s fault. If anything, given his experiences, its a perfectly logical and valid approach to the problem. And, more interestingly, this rather crappy way to deal with it is TOTALLY the fault of the handicapped people. Maybe JamieMcgarry should focus more of his anger on the handicapped that act like jerks (where you are damned if you do and you are damned if don’t) that cause us non-handicapped people to not know WTF we are supposed or not supposed to do.
I’m sorry if my reasons for joining SDMB don’t align neatly with yours or with the typical member here but my experiences with my disability and it’s relation to the rest of the world IS what motived me to join in the first place. And anger is not the motivating force behind what compels me to share these stories. It’s the desire to eliminate ignorance and change mind-sets regarding disability and it’s place in society. I will admit, given the extremely personal nature of the subject at hand, that I can at times have a hard time seeing the issue from a completely objective point-of-view. That is what I hope the opinions (some of them at least) here help me achieve. But some of the opinions here also reinforce to me the need to continue to evolve my fight against the oppression (and yes, that is what it is) of those with severe disabilities. I am someone with a well-rounded set of interests, however, and I do engage the board in other topics and subject matters. I am not someone who irrationally dismisses thoughtful discourse on ANY subject, including disability related matters. However, simply because I thoroughly disagree with an opinion doesn’t mean I “angrily dismiss any counterargument” to my own.
Jamie, I don’t blame you for ignoring my previous post (#15) since there’s been a lot of responses, but I’m going to reiterate it in hope that you will respond, since I’m genuinely curious. (repost follows)
Not that it’s in any way equivalent or related to the situation in the OP, but I’m curious about something else. Do you appreciate or dislike when people go out of their way to hold a door open for you?
By “go out of their way” I mean that it’s not just a normal act that they would do for anyone else near them, but an act where they wait for you, or run ahead of you, to specifically hold the door open for the guy in the wheelchair.
Only thing I have to add to this thread is that I HATE being patronized to. Hate it with a passion. So I project that in my every day life, I guess, because I make it my freakin’ duty to avoid patronizing anyone else.
And that guy was super duper patronizing if indeed the story went as the OP presented it. And I tend to take posts at face value.