‘Are you cold?’… again?
I’m at the train station. I just pushed myself 3 miles in a wheelchair to get there all through the backstreets of Southampton. I’ve left my car at the garage getting serviced and decided to make the long journey back on my own to Southampton Central. There were moments when I was wheeling at real pace, the strength in my arms now surprising even to me.
This is important because you have to understand that my sense of my own competence is high right now. I’m working on a manuscript responding to peer review (looks like it is going to reach publication) the podcast is doing really well, and I’m now physically strong enough to go wherever I want.
And it’s in the context of this confidence that a member of station staff approaches me. He bends low, clasps his hands in front of him, and asks ‘where are you headed?’ with the musical intonation of a preschool teacher. This happens a lot, and I’m kind to him because he’s offering help and I’ll accept and I’m so glad that I live in a place where this kindness is so prevalent.
Moments later there’s a train sitting at the station about to leave and a gentleman approaches the door from inside the train, presses the button, and we watch the door slide open. He tries to get my attention. I take my headphones off and I say ‘hi, what’s up?’ and he asks genuinely…
‘Are you cold?’
I’ve experienced this question before, and found it as strange then as I do now. I hesitate for a moment refraining from a touch of exasperation. I realise he is being kind to me and I appreciate that a great deal, but I’m honestly curious what happens next if I tell him that I am indeed cold.
He tells me that he will go and get me a jacket and points vaguely outside of the train toward the platform. I’m not entirely sure where he’s pointing, there are no clothes shops here, and I’m not sure how a passenger on the train could acquire a jacket from somewhere on the platform. Is he offering to assault a fellow passenger to steal one? Am I being invited into a criminal conspiracy? Worse, is he going to do the hero thing and stand on the platform and shout ‘can anyone give up their coat? I have a disabled woman here!?!’ We’ve seen something like this happen before.
Of course I tell him it is fine, that I’m fine, and I am fine. What I don’t say is that if I was cold I could solve that problem as well as anyone else.
On the way home I stop on the side of the street waiting for the crossing to start bleeping permission for me to cross. A young woman approaches the corner I’m sitting at and I check she can get past. Indeed I’m a clear metre away from a nearby wall, plenty of room. She slows as she approaches me, presses herself against the wall, and inches past me, her back rubbing against the brickwork. It looks like she’s trying to sneak loudly into a bank vault and I imagine she is about to acrobatically avoid the invisible lasers. Does this woman think I am contagious, that she might catch wheelchair use from me? Is she concerned I might do something unpredictable, like reach for her as she passes? Is there a Pratchett-esque bank vault back there that I just can’t see?
That very evening I head back out to Southampton on the train and I’m at the Winchester station searching the signs for the next train. A member of staff approaches me from behind. He asks me where I’m headed, as staff often do because they want to provide assistance, always a good thing. I respond, slightly startled, ‘uhh, Winchester’. If I had been standing, this kind fellow would have said ‘uhh we’re actually in Winchester’ and we would have both laughed at my embarrassment. But I’m in a wheelchair and he instead takes a deep breath, bends down, and says ‘ohh, ok, we’re actually in Winchester’ in the way one would speak to a lost child. His statement and tone are such a left turn in the conversation that it takes me by surprise and I laugh a little, and that does nothing to assuage him from what is fast becoming a confident assumption that I am disoriented or have difficulty travelling alone. ‘Southampton Central’ I quickly correct ‘I… heh… I realise I’m in Winchester’. He smiles as he might at a child’s attempt at a macaroni sculpture, and I realise that I can do little now to correct his perception.
Somehow shouting ‘I have a doctorate!’ starts to sound a bit desperate.
The problem with these interactions is that they reflect back a version of myself that doesn’t match my own self-concept. The effect is insidious. I start to feel incapable, unconfident… and weirdly… undesirable. Especially with this last interaction.
I like to think I’m pretty, at least that I put myself together pretty well, and my makeup game is on point. I have a sense of style that I really like. Every time I flex my muscles in the mirror I feel like I could burst right through cheap sleeves like Lou Ferrigno. When in my head I imagine approaching a beautiful woman in a bar I’m the femme equivalent of Don Draper. I’d roll up, she’d go to sign the check, I’d stop her and say: ‘you don’t need to do that… you’ve already made a distinct impression’ as I hand over my card to the bartender without breaking my gaze into her alluring eyes.. To be honest, I never was much good at dating. And having dealt with a multitude of real-world interactions like I’ve described, I assume I’d roll up to a woman, suave and sophisticated, to see her look around for my carer because I’m clearly lost. It lets the air out of my tyres before I even get up the nerve to say hello.
We’re going to need to talk about disability and sexuality, about disability and desirability, because people’s reactions to me in the chair are doing something to how I see myself in the world. It is doing something to how attractive, how confident, I feel. It’s even doing something to my sense of my gender in the world, how I experience I’m perceived in my womanhood. I don’t understand it all yet but it feels important, fundamental.
At the end of the evening, as I wheel my way uphill the final couple of hundred metres home, I put my headphones on and listen to music. I feel the wind, the rims beneath my hands, the familiarity of the push, the speed with which the Rocinante responds. I search inside for that view of myself as defiant, capable, debonaire, and I find that she’s a little further away, it takes just a little more to reach her. I find her though, with my arms filthy from the wheels, my face still marked from the mask, out of breath, determined.
What all the kind people offering me a jacket do not realise is this – as I find my confident self it kindles a fire within me…