Chronicles of a Procrastinating Novelist Volume 23: Hindrance to Help
A little over 4 months in my new locale and I’m awash in so many new impressions, emotions, and experiences that I’d fill a 1000 page diary if I tried to record them all, and none of it would properly convey the magnitude of all this change. But one trend has emerged, and it’s taken most of this time I’ve been here to find a way to articulate it.
Due to vision related issues, I cannot drive. In rural mini-town Georgia, between a dearth of sidewalks, Frisco-esque hills hemmed in poison oak, stigma attached to walking as transportation, non-existent Uber or Lyft, and one charity bus for the local geriatrics, I had to rely heavily on friends and loved ones to get around. Grateful as I was to all who helped me, it was faintly infantilizing to be so dependent in one’s thirties. Worse, it was isolating. As a writer, that was a massive frustration and detriment to the work. I have a decent empathic streak and a good imagination, but an ill-informed imagination is faintly useless to a fiction writer who wants to achieve even a glimmer of realism.
But here, in a more metropolitan setting some thousand miles removed from the sticks, my inability to drive has an entirely different effect. My transportation dependence has transferred to Uber, Lyft, or the public bus. Consequently, I’ve met Uber drivers from Greece, Liberia, Mexico, the Mongolian edge of Russia, and plenty of white kids in college. I’ve had fascinating conversations, such as one with a former military vet turned ESOL teacher. Discussing linguistics, culture, and the evolution of language was an absolute joy for the space of a 20 minute car ride, and I came away enlightened about the heightened emotional presentation in anime and manga.
Then when my inner miser kicks in and I take the bus, I find myself at a sort of bridge between experiences. In my job and background, I share more in common with the privileged, white, college educated suburbanite than I do 90% of my bus riding companions. On the city bus, I’m surrounded by many poor, non-white, and homeless riders. The elderly woman who, like me, doesn’t drive because of her eyesight, but speaks broken English because she’s Latino. The homeless black guy nursing a Hershey bar in two square increments that he wraps up as if it were a delicate heirloom to preserve its integrity. These are people I’d have little opportunity to see, let alone spend 30 minutes in the company of while I listen to conversations and observe a set of priorities entirely removed from the athletic college chicks who run laps around the lake across the street from the hospital where I work and discuss in which country they plan to spend Spring Break.
My greatest hindrance has suddenly become an asset.
My world has broadened and uniquely placed me if I keep an open heart and level head. It’s humbling, entrancing, and something I shall endeavor not to take for granted.
Thank you for reading,
B
