No thanks i’m fine!

Today I want to talk a little bit about something that may be a new concept and term for those of you who don’t work in the education field but those of us with disabilities know it as well.      But first I want to tell you all a story as an example. Earlier this week I was sitting in a coffee shop tapping  away on my laptop as many others were doing as well.  The difference between me and the others is that I was the only one with an obvious disability.  A stranger approached me and inquired if I needed help.  This happens a lot.  I am very often minding my own business when someone will come up and offer me assistance.  I am sure this comes from a caring place but I am very often struck by the fact that just being out alone or with small humans in public while disabled means a lot of people assume that I am in need of help.  I was momentarily jarred from what I was doing and jumped.  Because one of the lovely gifts I got from my cp is that I have a low startle reflex which means sometimes the smallest noise can make me jump.  It is one of the very few things about having cp that continues to embarrass me.  Even though I have no control over it, it is the one thing about myself I would change in a heartbeat if I could.  Anyway I told her no thank you and attempted to go back to what I was doing.  She said with a very worried tone in her voice. “I think you need help. Who takes care of you?”  The internal gremlin in my head ALWAYS screams  and jumps up and down at this point what in the world makes you think I need help?  I am literally sitting at a table using the free wifi like everyone else in this room.  I said “I can see you are anxious but I’m fine and very busy.  Have a nice day.”   I’m trying out a new way of handling these encounters.  Go me! She continued to stare and after what seemed like an eternity that was probably less than a minute she looked at me and with the same tone in her voice said “Your family must have been very cruel to you.”and then she walked off.    I guess she thought that but not accepting her help (that I did not need). I was making my life harder or something along those lines.  I will probably never fully understand how so many of the people engage me in this type of interaction go right to your parents didn’t love you or teach you properly,  That’s definitely a topic for another post.  There’s a much better way to handle this.  Which brings me all the way back to the term I mentioned in the beginning of the post.  I would never advocate not offering to help someone who you think is struggling with something. I believe in showing kindness whenever we can because the world is in desperate need of more of that.  But it is so very important to presume competence.  Presuming competence means to presume someone knows how to do something in the way that works best for them.  No matter what we think makes their live difficult from the outside.  In education I have heard it used for students who may have communication difficulties, just because someone may have difficulty communicating in the way we expect doesn’t mean they aren’t  communicating or that they don’t understand what you are saying to them.  In my example the problem isn’t with the fact that the person offered me help.  It was that even after I declined she continued to presume based on only what she was seeing that I was less than capable of taking care of myself.  Then she compounded the issue by making other assumptions about me and what my life must be like.  She made her choices based solely on a five minute interaction.  If you see a person with a disability out and about and you decide that you’d like to offer help to them.  Listen to how they respond.  They understand their needs better than you someone who is just offering to help, ever will.  Whatever you decide to do take them at their word, it’s likely not personal and is no reason it should be seen a sign of a bigger issue. People with disabilities if we are lucky get offered more help on a regular basis that we could need.  💚