How a person went from not being able to walk to being able to work at her dream job.
A teacher from this school has recently told me a story when she was in a really low part of her life. When she turned 15, she had her whole life planned. She knew which university she is going to, and what she wanted to be when she grew up. She was a pioneer and she had her whole life at her feet. She grew up with a family that all worked in construction companies, but she thought as she described “a field that was missing”. They had plumbers, they had decorators, they had constructors but they did not have electricians, so she decided she wanted to be an electrician and ‘join the forces and travel the world’. She was the first girl ever in the whole southwest of England to get a partnership. She was ready to join a fully male-dominated industry, to the point where when she got interviewed the interviewer was extremely shocked and “his jaw dropped to the floor”. He didn’t take her seriously and even asked her if she was sure if she wanted to take the job. Later on, she got the job and “it was amazing… for 9 months”. After she got the opportunity to work at her dream job for her whole career, she had ‘a life-changing accident’, and her life changed forever. She couldn’t walk or work. She was in plaster for 3 months and then fiberglass for 5 months, and her parents were told she wouldn’t be able to walk ever again after 30. To her, she thought that it was a message to “not work in a man’s world’. She got sexual discrimination shouted at her every day, probably more than anyone will ever hear, in these modern times. So when she got knocked off her bike, She thought that it was just a wake-up call from the universe that she shouldn’t be doing it. She is past 30 and she is not in a wheelchair.
Her whole life had changed because of one night. She was having an argument with her significant other and she left with her bicycle in the nighttime with no headlights, and when she tried crossing the road, she, unfortunately, crashed into a truck and it broke everything inside her knee, fortunately, she wasn’t riding full speed. She went straight to the hospital, but nowadays people would have MRI scans but when she was little, there was no such thing as MRI scans so they had to cut into her knee and check it from there. she has 21 stitches and a 9 1/2 inch scar inside her knee and she has some elastic inside her knee. She gave up on her dreams as soon as her accident happened. She thought that “maybe she should be a secretary like every other girl in her class. After a few months, she absolutely hated it and so she worked hours in a council clerk and then she was an au pair. Her Physiotherapist was the person that told her that the doctors are wrong and that she will be able to walk past 30, and that gave her the hope that she needed to get her out of the hole that she got stuck in. So she finally went to college because one of her relatives told her she should learn hospitality. Her friend was being sponsored to go to college as an engineer by the army. She thought that she wouldn’t be able to go because she was a cripple, and her friend said “you never know until you try”, and so she tried. She had to do a lot of interviews and that’s when she did her MRI scan, and then they accepted her, and slowly all her dreams started to come back and her hope was starting to form.
The army in her opinion was “I absolutely hated it and that was the worst thing that I could have ever done”, so she left after 5 months realizing she wanted to become a teacher instead. Her experience in the army as a woman was extremely different for her. She said that she liked the fact that she didn’t need to make tea for herself and it was all already made but the thing that she didn’t like was that the room was full of naked women and it was “wall-to-wall naked women” and that’s where she felt extremely uncomfortable. The only issue she had was that one of the guards was like the queen’s guard at Buckingham palace meaning everything has to happen exactly how it is supposed to be, and he thought that women working with men in the same company was a slur to his masculinity and he was extremely against women fighting alongside men. She said that she wouldn’t change a single thing about her experience in life and that is how she wanted it to be. Her experience in all the jobs that she was doing was great and it helped her learn from it, and to be a better employee for her next jobs. If she hasn’t worked at some of her jobs such as a building site, she wouldn’t have been able to take the criticism and the way people are talking to each other. When she was a teacher in her first year, she couldn’t deal with parents talking about their child in an extremely negative way. The language she had heard was extremely overwhelming for her but thankfully she learned it all at the start so she knows how to deal with it at the end, and so she is a lot tougher for the rest of her life. She couldn’t do things she used to love doing such as swimming. When she tried swimming she could barely keep herself alive and she was crying from pain. She can’t be in the cold as well, Luckily she lives in Singapore where it is always hot but when she goes back to England, she can barely walk because it is too cold for her. But at least she isn’t in a wheelchair.
I have sent her an email asking what was going through her mind once she was told that she couldn’t walk after the age of 30.