“Are there no stairs from the first floor?” a random lady asked me mockingly as I, an apparently able-bodied whippersnapper, got off the elevator at the second floor.
I just stared at her. “I had an injury recently,” I said. She turned red and shut up.
Truth be told, the injury had happened a while back, when a car rolled into the crosswalk and hit me while I was crossing. My left knee hasn’t been the same since. But I took the elevator not just because my knee was acting up, but because I was feeling fatigued.
I get it. People don’t like to admit that young people can have disabilities. “You’re young and strong,” people would tell me when I struggled to go upstairs or lift a heavy thing. “Don’t be lazy.”
“Wait ’til you’re old like me,” they say when I expressed how exhausted I was. They pretended to make it a joke about themselves, but it was really intended to dismiss my experience as invalid.
And the worst: “What do you have to worry about? You’re young and you’ve got a whole life ahead of you,” they say when I admitted I suffered from depression and anxiety.
Ah, the stereotypes of youth, which apparently is wasted on the young. Except believe me, I would have celebrated my teens and twenties a lot more had I not been so crippled by my conditions, which were regularly…
