To be fair, I was always full of myself. One of my first memories is hiding in my bedroom, still a pre-teen, crying and begging my mum to tell the schoolmates who had come to request my company for something unutterably vulgar called “playing” that I wasn’t available. Why would I lower myself to the likes of hopscotch with mere children when I could be reading Oscar Wilde and admiring the breathtaking view in the mirror?
When I became a writer when I was still too young to vote – a girl from a working-class background, no less – my suspicions about my own exceptionalism were confirmed. It didn’t hurt that I was tall, dark and handsome; it was easy for me to look down on people, both figuratively and literally. I had a friend who was smaller and poorer than me; sometimes, I’d actually pat her on the head. “Why are you friends with me?” she would ask me sometimes, when I’d patronised her a tad too much. “Because you’ve got a Disabled badge – we can park anywhere. It’s like being Princess Margaret!” I told her repeatedly, with relish. That would come in really handy now I’m far more disabled than she was, and on wheels.
But I lost her many years ago, by being repeatedly nasty to her. One day, she’d just had enough – like a lot of the friends I lost, even before I had my bit of bad luck during Christmas week of 2024. Now I am the one that people pat on the head – and I don’t even have a Blue Badge, though I’d definitely qualify for one, as I don’t drive. It was yet another thing that I thought people would/should be honoured to do for me, because I was so special; no prizes for guessing what my favourite Pretenders song was!
Of all the co-morbidities that come with being confined to a wheelchair, almost as bad as the insistent discomfort of an indwelling catheter is the pity. I see it in the eyes of the community nurses who check the pressure sores on my tailbone and toes; “I think you must be our youngest client!” one of them said, unwittingly making me feel even more than usual as if my life had been cut hideously short at an age when most of my contemporaries have a healthy decade or two in front of them.
I can see youngsters in the street thinking that I’m a sad, old thing, the way when I was a teenager at the New Musical Express I thought it about music writers in their mid-twenties. Worse, I am pitied by people older than me; with an older friend, some 20 years my senior and suffering from emphysema, I would regularly yomp off miles ahead of her while she called after me, asking me to wait. Now she can’t even take me out as I need robust people to push my chair; when a fitness-fiend friend tore her bicep recently, that was our liquid lunches down the swanee for months on end.
I’m pitied for my broken and missing teeth, for my thinning grey hair, for my mottled old man’s legs with the muscle wasted and hanging off like dirty drapes, and for my ghastly footwear.
Mind you, not being pitied can be annoying too; I feel cross when commercial van drivers park on the dropped kerb, making it difficult for my husband to get me across the road without a sizeable detour. Occasionally, you get nasty children far past reasonable staring-age who stare at me like I’m the biggest freak in the world. I get dogs barking at me like I’m Davros when I’m obviously a very nice dog-lover. I get rude and callous emails from NHS employees I’ve made perfectly reasonable enquiries of with reference to my next visit; never from the actual community nurses, who are wonderful, but from the managerial class who seem to think they’re extra special because they don’t get their hands dirty.
Am I being punished? I like to think I was quite nice, for an arrogant person; I gave masses of money to beggars and I was extraordinarily polite and generous to restaurant waiting staff. My husband assures me that the deity I believe in would never been so cruel, but I prefer the Old Testament to the New, so I’m not convinced; the one I have faith in does quite a lot of smiting, and pride is named as a sin – look at the Book of Job! It just all seems a bit…on the nose, if it really is a coincidence.
If I love all kinds of attention, why do I hate being pitied? Because it always had to be on my terms? But I never minded getting bad reviews or being talked trash about below-the-line, something which most of my journalistic colleagues are extremely upset by; indeed, sometimes I’ve been perverse enough to agree with my readers.
Why do people generally love it when people sympathise (or indeed empathise – the most ubiquitous and boring emotion around, in my book) with them but hate being pitied? Why is pride considered a sin but self-pity isn’t, when at least pride has a certain toughness of character to it? Well, whatever has happened, it’s impossible to turn back the clock; I’ll have to take my pity on the chin, and learn to appreciate where I find it. After all, perhaps pity is just kindness of a broader stripe – and kindness, as I’ve learned too late, is a wonderful thing.
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