Snow Melt

Day 27: Place yourself in the shoes

Place yourself in the shoes of someone who has a disability and write about something they THINK they cannot do but after trying and trying, they find they are able to.

I’m not going to write a story about someone else overcoming a disability. I’m going write about a personal experience. You see everyone has a disability of some type. Some individuals have physical disabilities, some have mental disabilities and for some the disabilities are the limitations a person places on his or herself. In addition, life, fate, or God, which ever you prefer has a way of pushing us to go beyond our disabilities.

My own problem is an extremely painful right knee. By extremely painful I mean that if I would more then one block the pain in my knee increases with each step. This doesn’t stop me from walking long distances when I have to. In the past, two or three month’s economic conditions and lack of a running car forced walk from ½ mile to two miles every day or every other day. Several time I had to walk from the grocery store to the bus stop and then either ½-mile or ¾ mile from the bus stops carrying bags of groceries.

There were times when I thought I wouldn’t make it home. Times I thought I might trip and fall on the way home. I knew that if I fell down there was now way I could get up by myself. However, I did make it home without tripping and falling. After I got home, my knee hurt so bad that I had problems getting out of a chair or into the bathtub. After soaking the knee in a hot bath for a while the pain usually subsided, it didn’t go away but it did subside.

The one thing I learned from all that walking was not to listen to my own negative self-talk. I had to focus on the next corner or the next fire hydrant not on how far I had to go. I couldn’t listen to the voice in my head that said I would fall or that I had to sit down to rest at the next corner.

Another thing this experience has taught me is that I can overcome my own disabilities whether they are self imposed or physical limitations.

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