I went to college to become a physical therapist. All of my life I had been doing it. All of my life people had told me I should go into it as a career. Now I would be trained for it, and paid for it, and do it for strangers. It seemed obvious. It seemed like the thing I was for.
The rage
Toward the end of my freshman year, and into the summer, I began to notice something in myself that frightened me. Every time I saw a person in a wheelchair, or using a walker, I felt rage. A low quiet rage. Not pity. Not discomfort. Rage — sudden and complete and entirely unreasonable, at a stranger who had done nothing but cross a parking lot in front of me.
There was nothing wrong with those people. The feeling was not a judgment about them and it was not anything I believed. It simply arrived, over and over, and I could not stop it and I could not explain it.
What it actually was
I know now.
I had spent eighteen years in a house where a wheelchair was not a piece of equipment. It was the reason. It was the shape of everything that had been decided about my life before I was old enough to weigh it. My body had learned what those objects meant in my house, and it went on answering that meaning no matter who was sitting in the chair.
That is displaced anger. Many people can have it for a wide variety of reasons. And it says nothing whatsoever about the person, situation, or object which may set it off.
But I was twenty, and nobody had ever told me any of that. And I had no one to talk to about it.
What I concluded instead
A person who feels this cannot be a physical therapist.
That was the whole of my reasoning, and I could not see a flaw in it. I could not spend a career standing beside people I felt rage toward — that would not be good for them or me. So I gave up the only plan I had ever had.
Eventually, I switched to social work because I had friends in that program. That is the entire reason. A twenty-year-old in trouble goes where she knows somebody.
The sentence nobody said
I have thought about that girl for a long time.
The feeling had a name. It had a name the whole time, and there were people in the world who could have explained it to her in two sentences — what it was, where it came from, and why it had nothing to do with anyone in a parking lot.
She did not have those two sentences. So she made one of the largest decisions of her life around a feeling nobody could name for her.
I do not regret the life that followed. But I wish I had been given the words at the time, which is why I write them down. There is someone else who needs these words.
God was leading even though I was confused. Choosing social work as a major gave me exposure to the information I needed to explain the rage.
Lord, You are not frightened by what rises in us unbidden. Where shame has kept us silent, send someone who can name the thing out loud — and let us be that person for somebody else. Amen.
Next time: five more words I found.
