When I lived in Los Angeles for a few years, I had a meditation instructor who asked me when I was 38 how many years I had been in chronic pain. “On and off since I was fourteen or fifteen,” I responded.

It was a question I would think a lot about in the next couple of years. I remember when I was that age, I took the pointed cap off a blue pen and carved lines with it on the back of my left hand. This form of cutting would permanently scar it. Friends, family, and strangers frequently asked me how it happened. I always had a lie ready. My favorite one was that I was once in a sex cult and it was part of the initiation. When I look back on this incident of self-harm, I realize I merely wanted to be in control of the pain I was experiencing, rather than only play defense to the health chaos that is my life.

When I was eight years old, a mere month away from my ninth birthday, I was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. The few months prior to this, I had dropped over half my body weight. When I look back at this time in my life, as the youngest of five children, I think my parents could have taken me to the doctor sooner. But I know now, over 30 years later, it was a rough patch in their marriage and my paternal grandmother had also died around this time. My parents didn’t see me. They didn’t notice I was sleeping every minute I could, or eating everything in sight, yet still rapidly dropping weight. I also had a constant thirst. At school I would get a drink from the fountain, go back to my desk and plop down, and already be fiercely thirsty again.

When I was 23, again a mere month short of my birthday, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I remember saying stoically to the neurologist, “What are the fucking chances of having both juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis? It’s got to be one in a million.” I would find out it was not unheard of. Once someone develops an autoimmune disorder, the chance of getting another one is high.

I felt cursed. I was not intended for life on planet Earth. Once I started to develop problems walking easily (or safely), this self-hatred increased and putrefied. I used to walk two to three miles a day. It was my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual therapy.

The meditation teacher I had in Los Angeles was also a master astrologer. I asked her to do my birth chart. It was fascinating because it was in my chart that I would overcome death at the age of eight. She knew nothing about my diabetes diagnosis, but I had told her I have multiple sclerosis. In the reading, it was revealed that I have something referred to as Pluto Opposing the Sun. Which sounds bad—and it is.

The element plutonium is named after the planet Pluto. Plutonium is the radioactive element used in nuclear weaponry. How would a nuclear war would affect our sun? It’s said that it would cause the pervasive darkness of a winter that lasts an extremely long time. Pluto is also the Roman god of the underworld, again cloaked in darkness. It would be considered a curse to have Pluto opposing the sun in an astrology birth chart, but modern astrology calls it a “learning” situation. She went on the explain that I will live through these hardships but turn it into transformative knowledge, and in turn impart this knowledge to people in similar situations. Tall order.

It started happening without my conscious awareness.

A dozen years ago, I went to my local co-op, a place I visited weekly or more often. It’s in a very busy urban area of Minneapolis called Uptown. This co-op is a place locally where I can buy traditional Chinese medicine herbal formulas. When I was diagnosed with MS, I chose not to start taking any of the very powerful immunosuppressant drugs Western medicine uses to treat the symptoms of this disease. There is no cure.

The people I know with MS who were taking them stopped because the drugs were causing problems with their livers.

On this day I visited the co-op, I had just finished an appointment with my neurologist. I had recently started experiencing a slight drag in my left leg when I walked. I was very concerned about it and self-conscious too.

I had talked to my then-boyfriend, now my husband, about how I felt the doctor had dismissed my concerns. She told me she didn’t even notice it. In a way, I’m sure she was trying to make me feel better and, in comparison to the patients she sees day-to-day, I’m sure it seemed uneventful.

But not to me. As I walked up to the store, there was a homeless musician playing a fiddle near the entrance. He had long gray hair, his clothes in rags, with his belongings in a strong plastic bag near him and his open fiddle case with a few coins in it. He was dead ringer for John Hartford, the Grammy-winning fiddle player who died in 2001. I had been lucky enough to see him perform a few times before lung cancer took his life.

As I walked toward the homeless musician, he played a Kentucky bluegrass tune. I dug through my purse for some change. It was embarrassing, I had only two dimes and two pennies, not even two bits. I tossed it in his case anyway. As I walked away, he said, “Thank you. May I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I responded.

“Do you believe scientists can measure how fast people are traveling in a car?”

“Ah, yes, sure,” I answered.

“Do you believe scientists can also measure how fast people are traveling in an airplane?”

“Sure.” I leaned in a bit to see if I could smell liquor on his breath. I couldn’t.

“Do you also believe scientists can measure how fast astronauts are traveling in a spaceship?” I nodded, wondering where this journey could possibly be going, but also enchanted by his enthusiasm.

“So, that’s over seven billion of us traveling in various modes of transportation every day and the Earth travels around the sun and the sun travels the solar system in a year and the solar system travels along with all the other solar systems in the universe….” At this point, I was grinning as he talked. “Do you have any idea how fast we traveling?

I laughed. “I have no idea.”

He looked me in the eye and announced, “One hundred thousand miles a second.”

“Wow, that’s pretty fucking fast.” We smiled at each other as I turned to walk away. “It was nice talking to you,” I said over my shoulder.

“Just because we’re going that fast, it doesn’t mean you need to think it should affect the way you walk.”

I spun around to look at him. “What?” I asked lamely.

He said nothing further. He bowed to me and began playing that bluegrass tune again on his fiddle.

I found myself stumbling back to my car, astonished. I collapsed in the driver’s seat in sobs. He had seen me and noticed my malady in the short distance it had taken me to walk the length of the co-op parking lot. We saw each other that day. How many times had I walked by a homeless person, pretending not to notice? How many times have any of us housed people done the same?

I have told this story repeatedly over the years to friends and family, anyone who would listen, actually. I notice how it affects people and seems to have a strong emotional power. I have tried to write about it repeatedly but I didn’t know exactly what to do with it.

A couple of years ago I was a finalist for a local screenwriting grant. I received some free classes with a local film organization. I took one about writing short forms for the screen, such as short films or webisodes. My screenwriting experience up until then was writing feature-length screenplays. We pitched our ideas in class and the instructor encouraged me to make it, saying this was the sort of idea festivals looked for, it had that punch at the end that spun the story in a whole new direction.

I decided to take a chance. I was getting my Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and screenwriting and I asked a fellow student if he’d direct it for me since I didn’t have any experience there. I wrote and produced this short film and called it 100,000 Miles a Second. This little seven-minute film has played at over 30 film festivals all over the world. The best part of going on the film festival circuit has been interacting with the people who see it and find out it touches some moment they’ve had in their own life when they felt hopeless and alone.

A quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost has echoed throughout not only my personal life but also the life of this film: “The mind is its own place, and in it self / can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Indeed.

This experience opened my eyes to the way disabled people like myself are treated and viewed in the United States. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better here than any other place in the world, but many people view having a handicap placard for parking as a privilege. Since I’ve needed to use one for parking over the past few years, I can’t help noticing how many able-bodied people park in them without a placard. I have encountered a few of them who are parking illegally in a spot as I’m parking next to them, and they have some flimsy excuse such as “I’m just going to be here a couple of minutes”—like that makes it okay somehow. People with disabilities are an inconvenience, they take up all the good parking spots! Navigating around someone in a wheelchair or using a walker will surely slow a person down if they share a sidewalk. If I had a dime for every time I heard a loud, impatient sigh behind me as someone attempts to get past, I could take a nice vacation.

The worst (and best) example of this behavior was when my husband and I attended a Dead and Company concert at Alpine Valley Amphitheater in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. We purchased tickets in the ADA accessible area of the amphitheater. To give you an idea of the terrain, Alpine Valley is, as its name suggests, very steep and rough to navigate. The ADA section is near the stage, always an enviable place to be. But in this case, it is because it’s a steep climb upwards, so the ADA section needs to be on a level surface for people in wheelchairs etc.

I love Deadheads, but they are opportunists. They will try to infiltrate a section if the view or the sound is deemed better. It wasn’t long before the ADA section was crowded by non-disabled people. Security did their best to boot people without ADA tickets out, explaining that the tickets were more expensive and reserved for people with mobility issues. A man who was particularly incensed by the demand that he leave turned to me and said, “You all think you’re so special, don’t you?”

I replied “Yes,” then told him to get the fuck out.

A woman then came through the section. She didn’t want to stay, she just wanted to pass through by hopping the fence at the opposite end. Security stopped her and turned her back around. It was too dangerous to climb over the fence and it was a liability for the amphitheater. The woman was embarrassed, and more than a bit put out. She turned to me, looking for some moral support. “Now I have to walk all the way back through this section!”

I smiled sweetly at her and replied, “At least you can walk.” She looked at me and shrugged, but I could see that her drunken embarrassment continued to mount. I caught the eye of an older guy in our section, he rolled his eyes at the fleeing woman. He was missing a leg and had a titanium pole in its place. We had chatted a bit up until his point, he didn’t volunteer how he had lost his leg and I didn’t feel like it was my place to inquire. I knew from personal experience that sometimes people with disabilities just wanted to be, they didn’t want to be an advocate for the cause and they didn’t want to be on display.

Dead and Company began to play “Touch of Grey.” This song was the Grateful Dead’s only Top 40 hit. This song was my introduction to their music. It was released when I was in junior high. During college I started my adventures touring with the Grateful Dead with a girlfriend and at this same time, I also met my future husband. He had already seen them perform many times.

When one of the song’s verses that is especially meaningful to me was sung—It’s a lesson to me/The Ables and the Bakers and the C’s/The ABC’s we all must face/Try to keep a little grace—I looked over and saw that the man with the titanium leg had removed it, thrusting it in the air like a sword, dancing and hopping on his single leg as the refrain came around: I will get by/I will get by/I will get by/I will survive…. He danced with such a singular force and enthusiasm. It was so beautiful to watch him in the ecstasy we sometimes experience in this life. I felt all my anger and frustration at the ignorance of a few members of the audience melt away. I danced next to him as best I could. He was my hero in that moment, and he continues to be an inspiration to me in darker times, those nuclear winter or underworld moments when we are bent on self-destruction.

I also remembered the many times I have been ignorant about various things, when I couldn’t see…before I was disabled, and I tried to forgive myself for not being able to understand. He was like that fiddler outside the co-op all those years ago, he too showed me another way to think, another way to see, another way to be.

Patricia Fox obtained a BA in English from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and her MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University. She is also an award-winning screenwriter and producer. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two endlessly entertaining cats. Find her online on LinkedIn and Facebook.