Gimp Etiquette
In comments to my BADD post below, Attila the Mom links to Sunny Dreamer's list of Wheelchair Etiquette and Mr. Soul says:
Wheelchair/gimp etiquette is different in different places. New Yorkers will promptly pick you up if you fall on your face, and then walk on without even saying "hello"--which to me is weird! OTOH, southerners say hello--or "hey!"--to EVERYBODY, therefore if they don't say hello to you, it is evidence of disability-phobia and avoidance.Speaking not just about wheelchairs but more generally, here's a roundup of what I recall some folks have said:
I am curious about gimp-etiquette elsewhere.
Bint at My Private Casbah has written about this:
During the periods of time that I've lived outside of the south, I came to see that people in those areas are just a lot less friendly--at least in the way that southerners would probably describe friendliness. It's not that they are necessarily rude but they just don't seem to seek out social interactions as much as we do down here. For instance, if someone saw me eating alone at the local coffeeshop one morning and they started asking me questions about my disability, I wouldn't consider it rude at all. It's just something we do down here. We will hold a conversation about almost anything with a stranger. On the other hand, striking up a conversation with the barista or customer at a northern coffeeshop, just isn't going get the same reaction.And so has Sara at Moving Right Along. Here on the reticence of New Englanders and trying to bridge that gap:
I think it would be a bit interesting to find out if being questioned (about your disabilities) by strangers bothers other southern PWD as much as it does those who are from the north. I wonder if others feel like I do when it comes to these sort of questions from others who have disabilities. When I encounter other disabled people and they ask me questions, it feels less like talking to a stranger. Even if they ask me questions that go beyond what I'd probably be comfortable telling a stranger, it doesn't really seem rude to me because I don't have to feel any pressure to give them the super-cheerful answers that I sometimes feel obligated to give non-disabled people. Does that make sense? I dunno.
So sometimes I would have a female customer with no hair, far, far less common than a male customer with no hair, and maybe she had that grey transparency to her skin people in chemo have, and maybe she didn't. Maybe she wore a kerchief, because she was okay with the baldness, or a wig, because she felt she had to hide it. And I would never know the truth of this person's life unless she chose to volunteer it. But I had all this -- yes -- love, and this newly sprung hole in the wall of reticence through which it all just wanted to leak over everyone. Yet there was nothing I could do except smile.And Steve at Planet of the Blind has said quite a bit about helpful strangers generally. I forget if he has expounded on regional differences, or global, since I know he's traveled, though he hints at it a bit here:
Sometimes I would think I knew the truth, and I would smile extra big. And sometimes I would ask people how they were in a voice that I tried to make thick with extra meaning, like some kind of metaphorical secret handshake. And sometimes they would beam back at me or smile sadly back at me in ways that hinted "handshake received and returned." And sometimes they wouldn't.
And all you wanted was coffee. Maybe a cholesterol busting eggs and bacon dish. Yes and you wanted silence. You wanted a moment's worth of freedom from American sincerity. You had wanted to sit, unclouded, contemplating your earthly duties with nothing more than a bite of scrambled eggs and a swig of coffee.I have to think about this a little before I generalize between my experiences in Minnesota, Illinois and Arizona, the places I've lived. But I will say that there are distinct differences between a rural Midwestern town and a urban university environment in the American Southwest.
O the vastness of disability. O the lonely geography of America and all its respective, shattered childhoods...
Anyone else?
14 comments:
Since the original comment was about talking to kids, I'll link to my "Talking to Preschoolers about Disability" post--it's not quite the same genre, but it might be helpful:
http://disstud.blogspot.com/2006/09/for-parents-talking-to-preschoolers_26.html
I suspect most of the tips could also work for most non-preschoolers, with modifications as needed.
It's very complicated, because human beings are complicated, because there is more than one of us and we are each unique. The thing I keep hearing over and over again, though, from all kinds of people in every geographical location, almost universally consistently, is "wait to be invited in." Don't bring up someone's apparent difference until s/he brings it up, because it's none of (y)our business unless you really care about this person, I mean care personally, and they want you to care. Don't insist on helping people; ask if they want help. Don't, as I wrote elsewhere recently, turn someone else's life into theater to satisfy (y)our own desire to feel like a good person. Stuff like that.
I understand what Bint is saying, and have known and loved many people from the south. I also come from a much more open place than where I live now. However, just because someone is warm and friendly doesn't mean s/he's also polite and considerate, and bringing up another person's potential source of misery just because you're bored and want to talk seems wrong to me, even if it is culturally acceptable locally. As a rule, I would say wait until the other person brings it up. There are exceptions, though, always exceptions.
Recently Liz was delighted to have someone at a garden show call out, "I recognize that haircut! How are you doing?" If someone had said that to her while she was still in chemo, deathly sick, and still bald, I wonder how she would have responded? I think it would have mattered if the person appeared, like this one, to be going through the same thing. If a perfect stranger who was apparently perfectly healthy had said it, well, you know, she's in the south and seems like a generally friendly person, so maybe it wouldn't have fazed her, but I can't help but expect it would have charmed her somewhat less.
Generally, no matter where you live, I think it's best not to bring up hideous things like cancer to strangers who seem to be suffering with it, even if you've got it, too, and no matter how much you burn to express sympathy and/or support. People who have it or any other nasty thing to deal with every day deserve any minute or two of their lives they can grab where they don't have to think about it, even if the rest of us are exploding with love and a desire to be of use. They'll let us know if they want something from us.
As a rule, my rule anyway, just always be yourself. If you screw up, you will be corrected, and if you're corrected, accept the correction with good grace, not defensiveness, anger, or blame. Meanwhile, understand that the best way to be of use to others is often to do nothing extraordinary at all.
Minnesota or Boston, if you and I met in person for the first time at, say, Barnes & Noble (not too big a stretch!), you would probably not ask me what I did to myself to walk so funny. I would not gawk at you or talk to you like you were five years old, I would strive not to get in your way, I might offer to open a door for you if I saw you at one, and I might also walk by completely oblivious, but I would not under any circumstances shriek, "Oh, you poor thing! God bless you!" I might back into you if I didn't know you were there and fall all over myself apologizing for my klutziness, because that's something I do all the time, with all kinds of people. I get wrapped in my own dreamworld (especially in bookstores) and sometimes actually step on people not looking where I'm going, and am then horribly embarrassed. I would not be more embarrassed to step on or smack into you than anyone else. (Compare and contrast with a woman I met the day before yesterday in the grocery store. I'd dashed over there on my trike to pick up a baguette because I wanted to make a tofu submarine. She got in my way purely accidentally, apologized appropriately, and then, for some reason I'll never know, noticed that I had a fake foot at the end of one of my pant legs. She started apologizing extra, like it was especially bad that she'd gotten in my way. She fixated on my foot. She kept staring at, almost running her cart into a display. Then she circled around the produce section and came back to stare some more! At my foot! Geez!)
Assuming no clumsiness were involved, I would smile and say hi while we passed each other or shared space, or make conversation about the books if we were trolling the same display, because that's what I do with everyone I don't step on or smack into. For a long time living in New England I stopped smiling and saying "hi," though, and got all furtive like, not everyone else here, but so many people. I had been rebuffed just smiling and saying "hi" so many times! But working retail I realized that the people around me were starved for kindness, just suspicious of strangers. They needed to see a motivation for the kindness or at least have it framed by a safe environment like a grocery store cash register before they could accept it. And then I realized that even though I'm a "foreigner" here, I had let local culture shrivel me.
So I'm back to smiling and saying "hi" to everyone. And on a nice spring day, everyone smiles and says "hi" back. Almost everyone, anyway. (You can read more about that at another of my Love Thursday entries, here.)
Of course, I don't have the same expectations for children that I have for adults. Children who walk up and ask me "why [I] have that" (they mean my prosthetic leg) get an honest, open, simple, cheerful answer. I show them how it works. I explain that it's made out of the same stuff as bicycles. When they ask me what happened to the other one, I tell them it's buried in the backyard where I used to live (because it is). If I'm wearing sandals, sometimes I ask them if they think I should paint my rubber toenails. It's fun to watch their parents calm down while I do this, because the poor parents were raised to feel awkward and on tenterhooks around people with obvious physical differences. And people like me always shushing them (but not their kids) in blog posts just confuses them more.
I now speculate it may be because they weren't ever properly socialized around any. And I now realize from reading this blog that for people my age, part of the problem might be that they never met any kids with obvious physical differences when we were kids, and never played with any intellectually disabled kids. Children with developmental disabilities were taught in separate classes and thus deemed to have cooties, and children with physical disabilities that put them in wheelchairs couldn't attend our public schools for a long, long time, something that doesn't occur to people who were raised able-bodied.
I used to cut people more slack. I used to be as open and relaxed with intrusive adults as I am with curious children, but I got freaked out by the combination of how many there were -- like the guy who stopped his car and got out to talk to me while I was walking to work one day! scared the crap out of me! -- and how many just got freaked out themselves and started voicing all kinds of projections all over me. ("You poor thing! God bless you!") Since I was raised to behave better in -- I thought -- a whole neighborhood of people raised to behave better (in Rancho Palos Verdes, BTW, Penny), I have been sincerely shocked by the number of people my age and younger who apparently weren't.
Sorry; I don't mean to hog your comments, and I really have to do other things today besides blog! But all this has been on my mind the last six months. I've been trying to sort through it, too. This is as far as I've gotten. :)
Hey, wow, Sara, small world! We don't live in RPV, but my son went to school up there for a few years.
As someone with a very visible impairment from an early age, I have had to put up with this kind of stuff pretty much all my life and I admit that I find it extremely rude when a complete stranger or someone I have just met can not be any more original than to ask me "what happened", sometimes without even bothering to say hi first or actually interrupting a conversation I am having with someone else. I find it astonishing that many will be offended when I tell them simply that I do not want to talk about it, that they will insist and get pissed off and I have even had people yell at me because I refused to answer.
I have also been on both sides of the coin so to speak, periods in my life where my health was better and that my disability was not really apparent and other times when it was. And I can say that the contrast is huge in how I was treated.
I understand that there still needs to be education and outreach and "demystification" and all that but I think there are times and places for that and I think that people with disabilities are entitled to have a life that is not all about their impairment all the time and that they are entitled to choose when they want to educate people and when they just feel like having a cup of coffee somewhere without having to be on show all the time. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not seem to get (or care) that we actually do have other interesting things to share besides our medical histories. And at some point in my life, I stopped feeling responsible for others' short-sightedness or lack of savoir-vivre.
Wheelchair etiquette in the United Kingdom seems to vary as much as it does in the States.
Sometimes you come across kind, helpful people; other times you come across ignorant pigs!
Thanks, all, for your comments.
I have to admit that it cleared some things up for me, and fuddled me in other ways. LOL
I guess the responses to each situation are as varied as the individuals involved. LOL
Thanks again!
Coming back to how I think behavior differs in the various places I've lived:
Rural versus urban and suburban makes a difference, as does Midwestern versus Southwest. In an urban environment, I do think people are more likely to note difference but mind their own business. Rural people and situations seem to involve much more nosiness or intrusiveness or overwhelming friendliness, however you interpret that. Perhaps part of that is because in rural areas people are likely to know each other or know people in common and finding those links is sort of a rural past time.
At university in Arizona, the access available on campus, the golfcarts for temporarily disabled students to ride in, the federal mandate to provide equal access all worked with generally eclectic environment to make people less intrusive than off-campus. Fewer complete strangers asking questions. Usually it was in the acquaintance stage when the inappropriateness kicked in.
The Southwestern environment of Tempe was a transient population of people, as was suburban Chicago where I went to high school, with very few of my fellow students being from there. That creates a bit more of an eclectic environment too, I think, and makes people less friendly/intrusive.
I agree with Sara that "friendly" does not equal "polite".
Sara said: I get wrapped in my own dreamworld (especially in bookstores) and sometimes actually step on people not looking where I'm going, and am then horribly embarrassed.
Heh. The scooter I've had these past few years has a horn on the handlebars and I had to get it disconnected because I kept accidently leaning on it while browsing bookstores. Damn ye loud horn! Just when I think I'm quietly unobtrusive: "Beep! Beeeeeep!"
I used to cut people more slack. I used to be as open and relaxed with intrusive adults as I am with curious children, but I got freaked out by the combination of how many there were -- like the guy who stopped his car and got out to talk to me while I was walking to work one day! scared the crap out of me! -- and how many just got freaked out themselves and started voicing all kinds of projections all over me.
Yep. I find it hard to keep up the trooper attitude that every encounter is an opportunity to educate. It may be true, but it's certainly not a position that pays well.
Okay, this post really got me fired up. Well, actually it was Sara's comments that bugged me. What I wanted to say about it was kind of long so I put it on my blog instead of clogging up yours. You can check it out if you want.
Please Don't Assume I'm Miserable. Just Ask Me.
Great posts, everyone!
My reply to "What happened to you?" is usually "Lots of things have happened to me"--and if they persist, rudely asking "NO! I mean, what happened to your LEGS!?"--I say, nothing, why? I won't give them shit.
As KimberleyB likes to say, if you don't know me well enough to ask about my sex life, you don't know me well enough to ask about my disability.
Kimberley is far more uncompromising, replying to "what happened to you?" with "Why do you want to know?" and stares back while *they* attempt an answer. Then she just says "Oh" and *still* doesn't reply.
I have used that one a few times myself, too. ;)
Fuck their questions. And as another activist, Karen Hwang, once put it on New Mobility: "My personal trauma is not fodder for their idle curiosity."
"My personal trauma is not fodder for their idle curiosity."
In my teens I used to practice creative answers:
"Shark attack."
"Lone gunman."
"The plague... I'm contagious, how're you?"
I am, as always, late to the party; I came here through a long series of links that included Bint AlShamsa's blog and her response to this post. In any event, I don't get asked about my disabilities by strangers, for the simple reason they can't tell I have any, but Mr. Soul's comment made me laugh/wince:
"As KimberleyB likes to say, if you don't know me well enough to ask about my sex life, you don't know me well enough to ask about my disability."
Trust me, you don't want to go there. I once spent an hour cab ride fending off questions about how my (FTM) partner and I had sex and whether he stood to pee and whether I knew when we started dating that "he didn't have man-parts." People aren't really any less intrusive about sex lives that differ from their own than they are about bodies that differ from their own.
(Incidentally, the only answer he got from me on the "Can he do the sex with you" question was, "Mmmm, you should never underestimate human ingenuity.")
And sometimes they ask about your sex life because you're disabled.
That's one long cab ride, Maudite, with questions like that.
Yes, Blue, it certainly was. I was tempted to stop him and get out, but it would've been the sort of grand gesture that accomplishes nothing and leaves you stranded in godknowswhere Milwaukee at 2 am. Plus, I was teaching a Trans 101 the next morning, and I sort of felt like I had to practice.
But good lord, I'm just glad it's funny now. ;)
Post a Comment