Many years ago I stated there is a song for everything. I am not certain that I really knew just how accurate that off-hand comment was. This morning I have been exploring my childhood and how and when I realized that I really seemed to see the world from a different perspective than other people. I don’t say this because I’m somehow magically special but because I was literally built this way. This is why I decided on Cher’s song “Half-Breed.”
I was born with a visual impairment. Immediately I was made to sound useless and like I was a mistake. My parents were told that I was going to be deaf, blind and mentally retarded. The diagnosis broke my mother. Her death broke my father.
From the day I was born, I was different. I looked very much like everyone else. Sure, I was a bit small but not out of the ordinary. I looked different because my eyes acted different, I didn’t act the same way as others, I didn’t send and receive signals the same as the other kids my age did. I never fit in because of other people put me into an “other” category. I never chose this category, I didn’t want to be abnormal, special, or out of the ordinary in any way but I was never given the chance to be anything but.
This is one of the reasons I have said, “I do not make myself disabled, other people make me disabled.” I know that I am not unusual here too. This happens to disabled people, women, blacks, different ethnicities and hell even not liking the same sports team or listening to the wrong kind of music can put you in the “other” category.
Back when I worked at the concert promotion company, we would hire the occasional person to act as more of an assistant to the owner. It was a low-skill, mostly secretarial job which usually fell to someone who was studying at university or between something more serious. I was part of the hiring process there, and once a resume was nearly discarded just because, and I kid you not, they lived on the wrong side of the tracks. I said, “You should not assume that they want to be there, you have no knowledge of why they are there and who they are otherwise.” I had to step in for someone I did not know because I feel that I have been that person a lot in my life, even back then.
I wish I could say though that my input made a difference but the owner hired whoever he wanted and our hours of careful consideration be damned.
I think that we are all sorted out for stupid reasons, but my whole point here, with the choice of this song and the point of this post, is that there’s a lot that we are sorted out for things we have absolutely no control over.
Of course it can work in our favor too.
The problem with this sort of pre-sorting though is that it might be for one single trait that does not reflect the rest of the person.
Take the man who ran a local nonprofit literacy organization before me. When I took over the job, the bank account had less than $3,000, and we owed $3,000. Before he left, he paid himself the least salary that he had ever in the years that he ran the organization, $16,000 was his yearly salary. What was mine? $600. He left because he could no longer lie his way to a free ride. Oh, yeah, when he took over, he was paying himself $32,000. He padded the board of directors with yes-people and people who didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t care. One of the board members was even a man who had single-handedly killed a local festival that had gone on for at least a decade and that was something that brought people to this otherwise unremarkable city.
I know, calling someone a liar is heavy but at the time I tried to talk to people about it, I literally had about 200 pounds of evidence and I could talk to anyone who worked with him and they contradicted almost everything that he was telling funders.
So, yes, he was a liar and a swindler.
For the amazing sum of $600 a year in salary, I turned that nonprofit around. I helped restart a nonprofit which the previous man had absorbed and paid off all the debts.
I lost that job because other people didn’t respect me, refused to respect me. To them, I was just an inconvenience.
To that person I say, “Congratulations, because of you there are people who are not receiving help that they deserve.”
I’m not bitter. I’m sad. There’s far too many people out in the world who are in it for themselves and no one else. That’s a very sad way to live.
I do what I can to help people now, even when I’m not paid for it and there are many ways I can not help. I at least try to make the world a better place for people like me.
I have the picture around somewhere of me and a former friend of mine standing with Bill Cosby who is wearing a sweater which the promotion company I worked for at the time to honor his son had embroiled for him which simply read, “Hello friend”.
If you are not aware of the significance of that, please look it up.
