Unspoken Patience
Humbleness isn’t a virtue you’re born craving—it’s something life carves into you when there’s no other choice.
A high-level spinal cord injury doesn’t just strip away mobility; it rearranges your relationship with the world. My hands no longer belong to me in the way they once did. My bladder and bowels answer to their own clock, a relentless reminder that control—real, physical control—is a privilege most people never notice they have until it’s gone.
And yet, my mind? It’s still here. Strong. Sharp. Creative. Alive with ideas that could fill rooms, light up faces, and maybe even change a life or two. But that brain is strapped to a body that demands cooperation from others for nearly every small step forward. That’s the humbling part—not the injury itself, but the endless asking. The constant explaining. The dependence on someone else’s patience, precision, and willingness to get the “little things” right so that I can do the big things I’m capable of.
People love the “big things.”
They want the art. The insight. The entertainment. The proof that I’m still “me.” But those things don’t just happen because I will them into existence—they happen because someone helped me scratch my nose, plug in my charger, or position my chair so I can breathe without feeling like my ribs are in a vice. Those things happen because someone took the time to listen instead of rushing.
The problem is, many people want the end result without understanding the beginning steps. They want me to be completely independent—because that makes their lives easier—while quietly resisting the reality that my independence can’t exist without their attention to the unglamorous details. They don’t want to adapt; they want me to “overcome.” They don’t want to slow down; they want me to catch up.
This is where patience stops being a nice personality trait and becomes survival. Because when you’re in my position, patience isn’t about waiting—it’s about enduring. It’s about holding onto your sanity when someone hands you a spoon wrong for the fifth time. It’s about swallowing your frustration when you’ve told someone exactly how to angle your phone so you can reach the screen, and they still miss the mark. It’s about asking again, even though you’ve already explained a hundred times, because without that small task done right, your entire day collapses.
Patience, in this life, is a constant negotiation between gratitude and grief. Gratitude that someone is there at all. Grief that it takes this much choreography just to live.
Humbleness comes from knowing that I cannot force the world to slow down or understand, but I can choose how I respond when it doesn’t. It comes from seeing the same look of discomfort on a friend’s face when I ask for help that I’ve seen on strangers, and deciding to ask anyway. It comes from knowing that dignity isn’t in pretending I can do everything alone—it’s in embracing the truth that I can’t, and still finding ways to create, to connect, to matter.
This is the quiet side of survival after spinal cord injury. The side where you learn to accept that asking for help is not weakness. That needing others doesn’t erase your worth. That the real strength is not in walking again, but in living fully in a body that won’t always cooperate—and still managing to give something beautiful back to the world.
Even if it starts with someone just plugging in my charger the right way.
