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The Best Seat in the House
Mar. 15th, 2007 02:51 pmI just finished reading The Best Seat in the House (subtitled: How I woke up one Tuesday and was paralyzed for life).
I bought this book one day when I had some time to kill and happened to see a good bookstore near where I was. As often happens in that case, while I'm browsing around, some book (or two or ten) will strike my fancy. Two things really struck me while I was reading this book.
The first thing that struck me was how the author described his "rude awakening" after he was paralyzed -- how he had to re-think what was important in his life, how he had been just blindly following a rut without really thinking about what he really wanted to do. In many ways, it reminded me of when I came out. Coming out for me was a very painful process, but having lived through it, I'm very glad that I did have such a life-altering experience. It caused me to wake up and make conscious choices, rather than just following along a path that had been initially put in place by my parents and culture. I had to actually take ownership of all that I was, and decide which aspects of my personality and which goals I wanted to keep, and which I wanted to discard as no longer being appropriate to me.
Reading that section of the book also made me wonder whether someone who has already been through some kind of life-altering experience would have an easier time with doing it again (like, say, if someone who did the whole "coming out" thing later did the "wake up paralyzed" thing), or whether it wouldn't really make much of a difference at all. I'm guessing that it wouldn't make any difference initially -- while first trying to deal with being paralyzed -- but it might help out over the long term.
The second thing that struck a chord with me was when he talked about how he had previously disliked some of things about his mother, but then as he was going through his recovery and getting his life back on track, that he realized that some of the things he didn't like about his mother were actually traits that were helping him to survive and move forward. At one point in the book, he says:
Reading that reminds me that my father does have some good qualities, and that I shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I bought this book one day when I had some time to kill and happened to see a good bookstore near where I was. As often happens in that case, while I'm browsing around, some book (or two or ten) will strike my fancy. Two things really struck me while I was reading this book.
The first thing that struck me was how the author described his "rude awakening" after he was paralyzed -- how he had to re-think what was important in his life, how he had been just blindly following a rut without really thinking about what he really wanted to do. In many ways, it reminded me of when I came out. Coming out for me was a very painful process, but having lived through it, I'm very glad that I did have such a life-altering experience. It caused me to wake up and make conscious choices, rather than just following along a path that had been initially put in place by my parents and culture. I had to actually take ownership of all that I was, and decide which aspects of my personality and which goals I wanted to keep, and which I wanted to discard as no longer being appropriate to me.
Reading that section of the book also made me wonder whether someone who has already been through some kind of life-altering experience would have an easier time with doing it again (like, say, if someone who did the whole "coming out" thing later did the "wake up paralyzed" thing), or whether it wouldn't really make much of a difference at all. I'm guessing that it wouldn't make any difference initially -- while first trying to deal with being paralyzed -- but it might help out over the long term.
The second thing that struck a chord with me was when he talked about how he had previously disliked some of things about his mother, but then as he was going through his recovery and getting his life back on track, that he realized that some of the things he didn't like about his mother were actually traits that were helping him to survive and move forward. At one point in the book, he says:
[it] was a weird twist of fate that the person I was most intimidated by as a child and distanced myself from as an adult became the person I sought to emulate when the Big Test was slipped under the door...Honor your father and mother, indeed. One day, in ways you can't imagine, they could save your life.
Reading that reminds me that my father does have some good qualities, and that I shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.