I am a deeply spiritual, mildly autistic, and overly optimistic person. That’s not just how I define myself, for decades that’s what people have been saying and occasionally labeling me as. 

Mrs Fenimore was my 4’th grade teacher. Born and raised in South Carolina, she had the sweetest accent I had ever heard in my young life up to that point. Later on, as a teen I heard a Quebecois womyn calling my name and for a brief moment I felt like I was floating on air. But that’s another story for another day.

You see, in the middle of the fall term in Mrs Fenimore’s class a new kid joined. ‘Jay’ must have been one of the last kids in early 1960’s America that had contracted polio. Jay had a limp, wore a special shoe on one foot, and used a cane. This freaked me out.

Meeting this kid was my first and unexpectedly deep experience of the brokenness of others outside of my own family. I wept for Jay. Literally wept for this kid. I kept thinking, why him? Why not me? Why did this happen?

I think that as a kid asking these deep questions came from a place of sincerity, compassion, and confusion. They came from a place of ego too.  What with my autistic tendencies and being diagnosed with a heart condition at a very young age, here was someone who seemed to be more broken than me….

Mrs Fenimore was soothing and encouraging, mainly to redirect me back to school work. She encouraged me to become friends with this new lad, which was challenging for me as he was an outsider and was constantly made fun of and taunted.

I distinctly recall suddenly realizing that my class mates were treating him in the same way my family treated me. With that realization I made the choice to become friends with ‘Jay’ and the other shunned kids in my class. We united in our brokenness.

“Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.” Rachel Naomi Remen