Wherever my wheelchair goes, I go

As a person with a disability, I've had to face certain realities.

One of them is that wherever I go, my wheelchair goes. Because of that, people sometimes see my wheelchair first and it can be more difficult to engage them in seeing me. It's easy to get lost in a sea of assumptions whenever two people meet for the first time. The wheelchair just adds another dimension to that.

There are people who tell me that my wheelchair makes them nervous. There are others who want to ask a lot of questions. Some people have known someone in a wheelchair and I remind them of the person.

Of course I can't get bogged down in all of this every time I am around people. If I did, I'd waste too much energy doing that rather than interacting naturally with people.

Whenever I find myself noticing that someone has a reaction to the wheelchair, I try not to be too distracted by it. In fact I sometimes remind myself of how one of my blind friends teased me out of my self-consciousness by banging his cane against my wheelchair and announcing "Oh, that must be Ruth.”

That just about sums it all up. It is me-in a wheelchair. Like any form of mobility people use, whether it be a car, bike, skateboard,etc. , my wheelchair is a machine, a piece of equipment that gets me around. It is different in one sense - I don't like it when someone touches my wheelchair without permission. But that doesn't mean that I feel it is part of me. I've never experienced it as being part of my body.

It is part of my personal space, but that's different. I consider my eyeglasses part of my personal space and would be furious if someone came along and removed them without my permission. Not to mention that I would begin rolling into walls.

Maybe this will answer some of the questions people have about someone who uses a wheelchair to get around everyday. Maybe not.

All I can tell you is while some people are having a reaction to my wheelchair, I'm probably thinking about my grocery list, a cute guy across the room or some other unrelated topic. I doubt I'm thinking about my wheelchair-unless of course there's something mechanically wrong with it that day.

So don't feel like you have to think about it either. In fact, many times, I really would prefer that you don't.