perception – An Indelible Friend

As some of you may know, next year I’ll be studying in Japan for my third year at university. This is obviously very very exciting, and something I’m really looking forward to. However, the prospect of going to live on the other side of the world for a year when you have a physical disability isn’t ever going to be stress-free.

Now, you might think that my already having been on a gap year should make this a piece of piss, but the part I fail to mention when speaking about my year abroad, is that each trip was never that long, and I came home for respite and hospital appointments in between all of them. Thus, fully moving somewhere for months on end poses different issues to the ones I had to deal with when I was 19.

For example every few weeks, I go to visit one of my doctors and she treats my foot. It’s not complicated treatment, nor is it particularly specialised. So, you might assume that it’ll be pretty simple and easy for me to go to Japan and find a doctor there who can do the same thing…Well the problem with seeing a random doctor in a completely new country is that that medical professional isn’t familiar with my biology, and my ability to maintain a healthy condition of my feet does hinge a lot on my doctors knowing exactly how far they should go with the treatment. Therefore, trying to communicate that to a doctor who’s language I don’t know inside and out won’t be an impossible task, but it’s still pretty daunting.

Another fun thing I have to sort out is my university accommodation for when I’m in Japan. Tediously, I can’t walk very far and considering the fact that I won’t be able to drive whilst there, I’m going to have to be hyper-aware of how far I have to walk to go anywhere. Therefore, I have to make sure that I find accommodation close enough to my lectures and public transport so that I don’t end up getting a blister/infection in the middle of my year abroad. This isn’t an easy task when you can’t visit the place beforehand to figure out whether the website’s version of ‘it’s a 5 minute walk’ is actually true or not…but we do our best.

The main activity for this week though, was travelling down to Leeds for a hospital appointment to discuss how the hell I’m going to have access to new pairs of shoes when I’m 5,833 miles away from Leeds General Infirmary. Thankfully though, my doctor is a bit of a legend and he’s already started the process to order 6 pairs of shoes, 3 pairs of insoles, and 2 pairs of callipers, so that I can go to Japan with enough footwear to (hopefully) see me through the full year. This will then mean that I shouldn’t have to worry about my shoes breaking when I’ve got absolutely no way of getting new ones. So that’s already one part of the puzzle solved – well, it will be when I’ve actually received all the shoes and have confirmed that there aren’t any problems with them…but baby steps people, baby steps.

I don’t often mention these parts of my life because I can’t imagine them being interesting for anyone else to hear about, when they’re definitely not very interesting to me. But then when I’m having a stress-rant to my housemates about the hundreds of things I need to sort, they make it clear to me that these are the parts of disability that the wider world rarely gets access to. I shroud what I find tedious in euphemisms like ‘oh, I just deal with it’, or, ‘I’m disabled, I have hospital appointments all the time’, and then I never actually give you comprehensive information about how Spina Bifida affects my life on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, I prefer the discussions relating to self-identity or societal perceptions because they’re more enjoyable for me. But clearly, if I’m asking the able-bodied to help make my life easier, then I should give you a helping hand by telling you what I’m actually dealing with.

I can’t promise the tales will always be exciting though…but hey, maybe if people know more about the tedious parts of being disabled, then someone will want to find ways to design or invent something to make that tedium go away. And that’d be pretty cool.

The last 8 months have drastically altered the way the world works. By being forced to stay indoors for weeks – in some countries, months – on end, we’ve been thrust into personal isolation in a way we’ve never experienced. In the future, some will probably only talk about how they were really bored, unable to go on holiday, or gained an unhealthy obsession with TikTok during this time (guilty…). Whilst others will have worse tales to tell.

Overall however, there seems to have been an increase in how much the general public pay attention to the news. It’s an unsurprising change, given we had very little else to do…but even though people started watching the news more, it seems we still struggle to fully engage with what we’re hearing.

When we go through school, there are often moments in our classrooms when we’re encouraged to discuss the politics relating to whatever we’re studying: whether that’s how the social climate of 1920’s America influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or whether it’s answering the million-dollar question: why did Henry VIII have so many wives? However, a lot of the time our curriculum doesn’t actually encourage us to really think about the topics, and then relate what we learn to our society today. We learn phrases we know ‘the examiner wants to hear’, but we’re 15, so why would we need to care about these things outside of the classroom?

But then we come into the world and we’re completely unprepared to understand everything that’s going on. Only we’re not completely unprepared: it’s just that we’re rarely taught how to recognise that what we learnt about the Tudors, the Bolsheviks, or the Ancient Romans is relevant to us now. Furthermore, people think they don’t have access to politics because they don’t know the lingo. But politicians complicate things on purpose; they’re trying to make you think that you don’t get it because then you’ll leave them to it.

Plus as humans, we separate ourselves from our history and assume that because we weren’t there, we don’t need to give it that much attention. And our learning at school is for exams, it’s rarely for the sake of knowing. But trust me, you’d probably recognise a lot of the ideas and political tactics kicking about now, from your history lessons if you took a second to think about it. After all, humans can be amazingly innovative but we also have a habit of ignoring our past, then repeating it because we’ve ‘forgotten’ about it.

So I couldn’t care less about how many news articles you share on your social media: it’s your profile, do what you want. What I do care about though, is people asking questions and actively learning about the world they live in. We’re the next cohort of citizens and we’re inheriting a big, phat, stinking mess. I mean, the planet is literally dying…

You learnt so much about how the world works today from school and everything you’ve ever read. It’s not irrelevant and it’s not always ‘boring/depressing’: educate yourself about the positive/exciting parts of world history too. But there’s so much to be said for paying serious attention to humanity’s past mistakes, learning from them, and finally doing something else.

I listened to a podcast the other day that said around 22% of American millennials don’t even KNOW what the Holocaust was. And that’s terrifying. So please please please exit Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for a couple of hours today and read a book, watch a documentary, listen to a podcast, read an article – I don’t care, just learn something new.

An Indelible Friend

Tag: perception

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