As I am writing this, I am sitting in a Starbucks, with my cane leaning against the wall for everyone to see. The experience so far has been exquisite. Being a handicapped person, albeit a temporarily handicapped one, translates to essentially being an almost totally different person.
Here is how it all started: On the night of Thursday of last week (August 13), I decided to catch the 10:45 show for “Public Enemies” at the theatre. I left my house at 10:30, and got there at 10:45. Thinking that I was late, I started running as soon as I got out of my car. That was when I slipped just a tiny bit, not enough to cause a fall, but enough to twist my ankle. As a matter of fact, the ankle felt fine that night, but had gotten worse on the next day.
The irony here is that earlier in the day, I had ran my ass off on the treadmill at the gym and was fine, but I twisted my ankle while merely jogging in the parking lot of a movie theatre.
The cane, and ‘the pack’
On Friday, the day after my injury occurred, I went to a shopping mall to look for a fashionable jacket. It’s one of the bigger shopping malls in the city, with long walking distances from one side of the mall to the other. I had my cane in the car but decided against bringing it because I was meeting up with a friend and did not want to appear overly injured (yea, I know…).
Bad decision.
First of all, I had forgotten about the size of the mall when I got there, and only remembered after leaving the parking lot that the stores that I wanted to go to were spread all over the mall.
Second and more importantly, I underestimated the severity of my injury. I was able to walk normally in the duration of the meeting with my friend, but afterwards, as I began walking from one side of the mall to the other, my foot noticeably had gotten worse. It was soon no longer an option for me whether or not to walk with a limp, and towards the end I had to take a few breaks during my walk back to the car.
What I saw during my painful journey through the mall were twofold. Firstly, I had people looking at me because of how I was walking. Now, of course, almost all of those who looked probably were not discriminatory and were probably merely curious or concerned with my injury. But the larger problem was the speed of which I was walking, and the fact that I was walking noticeably slower than ‘the pack’ that were travelling through the vast halls of the shopping center, and people had to avoid walking into me.
This idea of ‘the speed’ and ‘the pack’ goes far beyond the notion of merely a bunch of shoppers strolling through a mall. How fast someone walks when they are in a mall tells a lot about their personalities. For example, a person who walks fast and energetic might seem to be in high spirit or in a hurry, whereas a person who walks slow might be viewed as laid-back or lazy. Yet, they are more or less in ‘the pack’, like a fish swimming with a large pack of its kind in a sea of wondrous goodies.
The idea becomes a bit more complicated when the method of walking factors into the discussion. The idea of the speed of a person’s walk potentially showing his or her personalities fits into a larger societal norm–confirmation process. Everybody fits into a category. These categories evolve overtime, but they nevertheless perpetuate the function of ‘the pack’. The question of how a person walks goes beyond ‘the pack’, because it has nothing to do with the speed of the walk or the facial expressions of the person when he walks. Thus, a person who walks differently stands out from the pack. This is what I felt when I limped slowly from one end of the mall to another; not only was I slow, my limping motion prevented me from fitting in, thus inducing people to be annoyed at my slowness, looking at me and wondering what is wrong, while still others thinking why I am hurt but that I did not use a cane.
The cane also in some ways works hand in hand with ‘the pack’. It is vital to note that even if a person does not walk in the same way as a ‘normal’ person, he can nonetheless compensate by turning to various assistances to at least gain the sufficient speed to join the pack, thereby emerge himself into normalcy. And when a person does not seek this assistance, he is viewed as ‘strange’ or weird.’
This is perhaps the most important part of this section: My decision to not use a cane and limp my way around the mall directly affected the way I was being viewed while I was at the mall. People think I am strange because I was limping without a cane; with the cane itself belonging to a category of normality, my lack of using a cane did not fit, and therefore I was not ‘normal’.
The beholder is also an interesting concept. What people think when seeing a limping person walking without a cane is the result of social indoctrinations in teaching us what to think when we see a person who limps, in that we naturally associate ‘limping’ with ‘cane.’ This line of thinking is by no means original; Foucault has made similar comparisons in his studies of insanity. By labeling some of the sick as ‘the insane’, Foucault argues, we are able to identify those who are not, thus ‘the normal’ (and ‘the pack’ in my example) is put into work.
Stay tuned for additional commentary for this social experiment.
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