ASK PHILIPPA
Our agony aunt shares her advice
QQ I’m a disabled wheelchair user. A few years ago, I had surgery and my recovery took three years. Afterwards, I went back into education to get my fine art degree but now, in my mid-20s, I’ve noticed that all my friends have fallen in love and are progressing in life, and I’m starting to feel left behind. I’m not sure if I’m looking for love because it’s never been something I’ve pursued, and obviously with my disability come a lot of ‘differences’ that could make dating awkward, especially now I’m 26 and have no past experiences of what will work. It feels as if it’s too late to just be beginning to figure things out. I’ve been feeling down recently, because I’m not sure where I’m heading in life, and because of my illness I feel I missed out on some of my youth, and now I’m stuck not really knowing if I’m an adult or a child. How do I figure out what I want? Is all of this just an irrational fear of the unknown? Is it okay to not know if I want to be alone or together with someone?
A All of us suffer from tyrannical cultural ideologies that pressurise us into feeling that we should be a certain way or hit certain milestones by certain times, as if there’s no other way to manage life.
The first myth that needs busting is that true happiness is only to be found in coupledom. This puts pressure on us to think we may want something because apparently everyone else wants it. But the reality is that you personally don’t know if you are looking for love and it is absolutely fine not to know.
Your friends are coupling up and that shouldn’t mean they do less with you, though in reality that can happen. But just because your friends are forming couples, it doesn’t mean you have to. A way to not feel left behind is to enlarge your circle – join a new group, maybe online, have more to do with a differently-abled community, or join a choir or form an artists’ support group. Joining groups like these means we can continue to meet people – not because we want to find a partner (if we don’t want to), but so we stay fresh, stimulated by new ideas and people, and have a source of potential new friends if old ones are retreating into coupledom, or other pastures new.
Another of the tyrannical ideologies that we suffer from in our culture is that we should know where we are going, and following an established path is somehow a rite of passage into adulthood. If you thought you had it all worked out and that you’d nailed life, you’d probably be immature, and you don’t strike me as that. When we ‘know it all’ and stop learning, we become dulled. You don’t need to label yourself as a child because you have lost years to illness. You’ve had some different experiences, and will therefore have unique insights and knowledge that others won’t have. This will help you continue to grow and will probably help your fine art practice.
Life is not a race. The challenge is not so much to figure out what we want and where we want to be, but to get more comfortable with not knowing what it is we want and with experimenting with what it might be.
This is a good daily exercise to practise. Ask yourself, ‘What am I feeling right now?’ When you’ve figured out the answer to that, you can start to find out ‘what do I want?’ When you have an idea about that, you can go for it or ask for it. You might not get it or even like it when you do. Life is for discovering this, and repeating the exercise as often as we need to. It’s never too late to try to figure things out. I work at it every day, and I’m 62.