We spent yesterday at the skate park at Venice Beach. They host a wheelchair skating clinic every year, and this is our second year to attend. While Ella did win “Best Grom (under 18 skater),” this isn’t about that.
There is something almost magical that happens to our wheelie kids the first time they roll out to a WCMX event. For many of them, it’s the first time that they see a large group of other people with chairs all in one place. For some it’s the first time to see anyone else who looks like them.
Imagine the isolation of being the “only one” for the whole of your life only to roll into a park and suddenly see a sea of people who see you as completely normal. Because to them, your life is completely normal. That’s the beautiful reality of these events.
While we hear again and again from the participants and their family members about the transformative power of being able to actually be just one of the crowd. We’ve seen children who resent their disabilities bloom into new life when they finally see that they are not alone.
Then we take it a step further and turn the chair which the world sees as confining and make it the means by which they can fly. Turning a hindrance into a way to play.
There are kids at these events who have literally never seen anyone else like them – not on television or the movies, not in their town or school, and certainly none of their friends do. We watch their faces freeze as the other athletes come into view, and some of them start to cry because at last they are not alone.
We spend a lot of time in our world promoting the idea of diversity, and having a collection of many kinds of people in our lives, but let’s not forget the comfort of sameness and the comfort of being able at last to blend into the crowd.
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