Erin Kelly reflects on an incident in elementary school, and how it helped her discover what a true gentleman and friend is.
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There was a time in my life when I didn’t think much of friendship. I didn’t understand the power it had or what that power meant. I didn’t really have anything to gauge what it meant for someone to “have my back,” other than what my family had shown me.
All I knew was that a friend was someone who you hung out with once in a while—and everything was cool if they continued to be your friend. If they stopped, however, it was supposed to be their loss, not yours.
People who I thought I was close to were constantly fading in and out of my life when I was a kid. Every time I blinked, it seemed as if someone had left the circle I was trying to build. There was one incident in particular that shattered my world at the time. It was close to the end of sixth grade—and my then best friend and I were getting ready to start junior high in a few short months.
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“Sorry, Erin. I can’t be friends with you anymore,” he said calmly, just as he normally talked to me.
”What? Why?” I was quick to answer because I knew this wasn’t like him and it completely caught me off guard.
“Well,” he continued. “We’re going into seventh grade soon. You’re in a wheelchair and I don’t want to be seen around you.”
As a young girl on the verge of entering her teenage years, my brain told me this was because he’d just found better friends and wanted to move on. That’s human nature. My heart, however, told me he really didn’t know how to approach or handle my cerebral palsy after six years—or no longer wanted to deal with it in any capacity.
He just decided I wasn’t good enough to be his friend anymore—at one of the most important times in both of our lives nonetheless. He only looked passed the shadow of my wheelchair to a certain point before suddenly deciding he was too “big” to be seen around me. It almost felt like he had stopped believing in Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny or any other prospects of possibility, and I was the one still holding out hope.
That was the truth. It had less to do with me being a disloyal person, and everything to do with something I couldn’t change about myself. I didn’t tell my parents about this until high school or soon after. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, what to do with it or how to bounce back. Most of all, I was hurt. I’d been belittled and doubted by people I didn’t know before, but never by a friend—let alone a best friend.
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I remember coming home from school that day and just feeling overwhelmingly betrayed. I was very quiet and subdued, trying not to let my anger and sadness spill out. I didn’t want to try to figure things out or make amends. I just wanted to be alone—whether it was good for me at the time or not. The whole situation brought a kind of pain I’d never felt before. Someone just stabbed me in the back and left the knife intact. I didn’t have any other friends who would take it out for me, so I sucked up the pain and quietly did it myself.
I figured it was the only way I could begin to heal and make sense of what happened. It was during this process that I learned for myself that people have the ability to hurt others. Not only that, but I think something inside me told me there’s a difference between a boy and a man. Granted, I wouldn’t come face-to-face with that difference until college—but I’m grateful I did at all.
Today, I not only realize the value of true friendship, but also what a gentleman is. I recently got to spend some time with one of my best male friends from college. He got out of his car, walked over to my mom’s van after giving her a hug and opened the side door to where I was sitting.
“What’s up, sis?” he asked. “It’s been way too long!”
“Not much,” I said. “Just happy to hang out!”
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The next thing he did isn’t new, but it revitalized me in a way that I can’t really describe. He proceeded to open the trunk of my mom’s car and get my wheelchair out. This has been routine for him for years, every time I get a chance to get together with him and his family, and he does it without being asked to do it. It’s such a huge change from what I’ve been through with people who I once believed truly accepted and embraced my disability. It’s a really beautiful thing.
A few days later, I went to the movies with another long-time male friend from high school—who also doesn’t “see” my wheelchair. Again, I was a bit taken aback because his perception of me has not changed after all these years, just like my friend from college hasn’t changed.
I’m extremely fortunate that an opportunity presented itself for me to “turn over a new leaf” in terms of friendship. I’m so incredibly grateful to now have many friends who constantly feel the need to take care of me in some way, form or fashion—a responsibility that the men in my life have gladly seemed to take on.
♦◊♦
Most of all, I’m grateful that the people I call my friends look at my disability as a natural thing. It’s not weird or strange to them—and it makes my heart happy to know that they know it’s not something to fear or run away from. In fact, they gravitate towards it and embrace it.
If anything, the past is in the past, but the ironic part is, I’ve learned from someone else’s mistake. I just hope that the person who threw away our friendship all the way back in sixth grade has learned something too.
Either way, I think it goes to show that if you don’t deal with what’s right in front of you, you won’t grow. If you don’t grow, you won’t learn. So, what good does that do for you—and for humanity—at the end of the day?
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Photo Credit: a083040/Flickr