Wheelchairs, Sex Workers, and The Truman Show

A Case Against Leading with Sympathy

My junior year of college I gained a friend. She was a talented musician with a wry sense of humour, and a fierce basketball player to boot — the kind of combination that seems unfair to pack into one human. She was also paralyzed from the waste down.

I told her I’d never played wheelchair basketball before, and asked if she would teach me.

I received a text the Saturday we planned to play asking me to meet her at her dorm. When I arrived, she was waiting with a spare wheelchair. I went to grab the handles and she smirked and shook her head at me. “Training starts now. Get in.”

I clumsily lowered myself into her middle school wheelchair and we set out towards the basketball courts on the other side of the rolling Tallahassee campus. Campus looked different from this new three foot vantage point. More challenging. Sometimes a small step down meant we had to take a 10 minute detour. Rough patches on the pavement were jolting. Blisters were quickly forming on my palms, making it painful to keep handling the wheels. Hills were nearly insurmountable for my weak arms.

One steep hill turned into my personal Everest. I was in front of my friend, and struggling. In order to gain any movement upwards, I had to shove the wheels forward, but the force involved nearly tipped the wheelchair out from under me. (I weigh more than a middle schooler, if you can believe it.) The steeper the hill became, the less movement I gained with each push, and the more I worried I was going to roll backwards into my friend in horrifying, slow-motion, reverse vehicular battery. I had an audience, too; it was game day in a football-crazed southern town, which meant tailgaters were crowded along the edge of this hill with nothing to look at but my failing Sisyphean efforts.

I could roll upward no farther; I felt gravity pulling me back towards my friend. I glanced over at the tailgaters and made a split-second decision. I winked back at my friend, leaped out of the wheelchair yelling “It’s a miracle!!”, grabbed the handles, and sprinted up the rest of the hill. My friend snorted with laughter.

A woman in a garnet and gold bucket hat gasped and tugged her husband’s sleeve. “Steve, did you see that? It’s a miracle! Steve!”

Difficulties navigating weren’t the only thing different about crossing campus by wheelchair. The people were different. Or rather, they were treating me differently.

Some appeared not to know how to handle me. They would pause their conversations and look over uncomfortably, seemingly unsure whether to make strangely direct silent eye contact or avoid looking in my direction altogether.

Others took the opposite approach and displayed a bizarre level of friendliness. Strangers would greet me, smile widely, open doors. This all felt good-natured enough, but it was also extra, heavier on the southern charm than I would’ve received walking on two feet. The greetings were a little louder, the smiles an inch or two wider, the doors held a few moments longer.

The difference was at once subtle and painfully obvious; it felt like I was wheeling my way through the first half of The Truman Show. I had never experienced interactions quite like this, and it was making me uncomfortable.

At one point an older man in front of us broke off conversation with his wife, spun around, craned his neck down and towards me, and said, “How are you?”.

It bothered me. Then it bothered me that it bothered me. I could identify neither what I was feeling nor what about his tone and expression was causing me to feel it. After all, he was just being nice. Right?

The following summer I interned with an organization that worked to offer options to sex workers who wanted to leave the industry. I spent early morning until evening with the women in the program, who graciously welcomed me. On Friday nights we would share a meal together, open to any women with current or past employment in the sex industry. The food was usually provided by volunteers who would leave after serving it.

One Friday I was moving through the food line, chatting and laughing with the other women, when the man who was ladling green beans onto my plate craned his neck down and towards me. “How are you?”

I had an immediate and clear flashback to the older man in front of the wheelchair. It was the exact same tone, the exact same expression. Extra. I smiled politely and told him I was good. After he asked a few follow-up questions, it became evident that he thought I had been a sex worker like the women in front of and behind me. I didn’t correct him. I smiled to myself, thanked him for the green beans and sat down.

I connected the two incidents, and finally identified what was bothering me: sympathy. Or more specifically, sympathy first. When people assumed I was wheelchair-bound and when people assumed I had been a sex worker, they led with sympathy.

Sympathy is better than judgment, perhaps, but it is not better than respect. In both cases, the focus was on my apparent hardship, rather than the rest of who I was (or wasn’t) as an individual. In leading with sympathy, they made it difficult for me to interact with them as a peer. In both cases, their tone, expression, and words conveyed the fact that they had something to offer to me, but left me no room to offer something back.

I have enormous privilege. That privilege allows me to leap out of a wheelchair and sprint up a hill when it gets too hard. That privilege allows me to stop being seen as a sex worker as soon as I walk out of a safe house. That privilege also allows me to be treated first with respect, then with empathy — if and when I need it.

The good news is that the latter is a privilege anyone can extend to anyone else. To lead first with respect, enabling others to interact as peers, and leaving room for them to offer something back.

Because we are all peers, and we all have something to offer back.