First time travelling abroad alone with my sticks

Another frontier to cross in my mobility journey. I am travelling to the UK to see old friends and some family and to get a taste of British Christmas. I will have an overnight stay in a hotel in London and then three nights in Cambridge with my youngest sister and her husband..

My experience so far?

Two main things really—it is like planning a military operation, you have to think of every possibility and work out ways to handle each eventuality.

Secondly, I have

plenty of work to do on myself in order to handle peoples’ reactions more skillfully.

Visualising my stay

Let’s look at the planning first. Of course, every journey requires thinking things through but when you have mobility issues you need to be able to anticipate where things can go wrong. In spite of all assurances, no-one knows better than you where the problems are likely to arise—when you’ll get tired, where the distance to walk is too great and how you can manage your luggage as well as your sticks and your balance. There is the travel itself. I have discovered Passenger Assistance and just hope they acually do what they say they will do. If that works it makes a huge difference. Then there is how I am going to spend my time while I am there. All the people that I am spending time with have know me for a very long time but they are not yet used to my latest manifestation as someone needing to sticks to enable their walking. When people talk of strolling around town, it’s hard to remember to at least double the time it will take for me to walk somewhere, compared to what they can do—and also how much more tired I will become.

My approach has been to try and visualize each step of the journey and my time in the UK and see what might be needed and where the gaps might come. It takes ages and I am lucky that I have a partner to talk it over with but I cannot expect anyone else to think like this. It’s my journey and learning how much to share and how much to keep to myself is all part of learning to work with all this.

Manage your emotions

It matters to me very much that I can maintain my independence as far as possible. I struggle not to be defined by my health issues and sidelined because of them. My wish is to learn and grow through the challenges I am facing rather than adopt them as limits that build a cage around my possibilities. Laudable aims perhaps but I am beginning to realise that they can make me intense and easily hurt. They can also make me more of a package for people who are going to spend time with me.

Here's an example—when taking part in a zoom call with friends in which they laid out plans for our time together, I found tears welling up as I fretted about what to do with my wheelie bag on our day out together. They had taken on the whole business of maximising our time together and without meaning to in the slightest, had left me feeling a bit blown away. I was worrying about where to store my wheelie bag and they just laughed and said we’d bring it with us! Somehow it was too much for me and my vulnerability became unbearable. Because they are old friends they quickly accepted how I was feeling and were sensitive to it, so I felt seen and nourished.

Family dynamics are different in my experience. I am the eldest of three sisters and they are used to my being in control. It’s a big learning curve for them to understand how things are for me now and to make adjustments from their side. It’s possible—though I am not sure—that there is even resistance to facing how things are for me—even a sense of competition. It’s very easy to push too hard and feel a brick wall that is painful to come up against.

It's been intense to plan this journey and not without stress and worry but I am invigorated and excited. However it goes my plan is to learn from this and work to build my confidence.  Viktor Frankl said: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. My choice is to work with what I have and find meaning in the journey.

Are you working with any age-related, or chronic conditions restrictions right now? What helps you?