ROPEIK: Age is just a number

Readers, I have not been honest with you. I have to come clean. I am not, as I have claimed, 20 years old.

I’m actually pushing 50. Or at least that’s what a lot of people seem to think these days.

Since my injury, I have been unceremoniously tossed into a strange limbo of feeling like a kid while being treated like an adult. I’ve been with my parents day and night, I’ve had a hospital room full of toys, I’ve hugged stuffed animals and re-read Harry Potter books when I’ve been lonely or scared. (Okay, maybe that last is something I would have been doing anyway.) I’ve literally been learning to walk.

It seems, then, like all signs point to kid. But 20 is a nebulous age, especially when removed from college and independent living. So even as I’ve sat through weeks of recovery feeling at times as if I was about a year old, I’ve also been confronted with a long procession of adults who seem to want to treat me as an equal.

It’s extremely hard to reconcile, and it’s made worse by the involvement of parents and my paltry knowledge of the health care system. I’m expected to speak for myself on my injury, which I can do &- but I’m also expected to have the kind of functional life that a normal adult would have, for purposes of the many therapy to-do lists we’ve made. My recreational therapist asked what I liked to do in my spare time at school: sit around on the computer in my dorm, sit around on the computer at The FreeP, eat bagels. Sports? A job? Hobbies? Yeah, right. Good one.

Last week my rehab psychologist said she thinks everyone’s treating me like an adult because of my exemplary attitude. I guess I’ve been mature. I haven’t thrown tantrums when therapy is hard, I chose to stay enrolled in classes this semester (a decision I am coming to heartily regret &- what is a midterm?), I’ve tried to stay positive and keep looking forward. I don’t personally feel that that makes me any more adult than the next guy.

I suppose there’s something to be said for the emotional high road. Certainly, I have been presented with the opportunity to either roll over in despair and give up completely, or to square my shoulders and take a deep breath and just get through it. I don’t actually see this as much of a choice. I can’t imagine having done anything but proverbially (and maybe not so proverbially) surviving. Maybe, in the immortal words of Albus Dumbledore, it’s the choice between what is right and what is easy. If that’s the choice that determines whether I’m old beyond my years, then I guess that’s the way it goes.

I should probably take this opportunity to add a detail of my story that I haven’t mentioned here yet, though The FreeP reported it and word does get around. I was injured when an apparently mentally ill woman on the street in D.C.’s Chinatown randomly stabbed me four times while I was walking to work at NPR in August. I would say tentatively that I’m over that part of my ordeal, though of course I have to assume that I won’t be over it for a long time. The spinal cord injury, however, which came when the knife nicked my spine, had caused me far, far more heartache.

My therapist, who is understandably constantly on alert for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, asked me last week if I ever felt angry. I had to consider the question for a moment. In the days after the incident (I still haven’t come up with a better word for it), I struggled to understand how something like this could happen to me, when I had done nothing, when it had happened in a wholly random, senseless fashion. I was forced to realize with shocking candor that anyone’s world can change at any second, in only a second, no matter who they are or where they are in their life’s progression.

But soon enough, the good things started. In the first few days after the attack, I was able, somehow, to kick out with my so recently paralyzed leg. I became aware of my amazing support network, from my coworkers at NPR to my friends from high school and BU to my neighbors and relatives. It occurred to me that I could get through this. And so I decided that I just would.

Through all of that, I was never angry, not directly at my attacker, anyway. From what I was told she was sick, and hadn’t been properly cared for. Try as I might, I couldn’t blame her. Not enough to feel anger, anyway.

If all that makes me an old soul, so be it. It might be mature to forgive and endure and be strong. But all I see is a bump in the road that I would be foolish to do anything but overcome.