Friend #34 - Rachel

I met Rachel through a sorority sister.  We agreed to have our first meeting at a coffee shop late one afternoon.  Five minutes before I arrived, Rachel called to say that the coffee shop was getting ready to close.  Rachel, who lives downtown, had walked there so I pulled up alongside the curb and Rachel jumped in my car, ready to look for another location.

“Didn’t your mama ever tell you not to get in the car with strangers?” I teased.

“You aren’t a stranger.  We’re sisters.”

And that’s just how trusting Rachel is.  She is a sensitive soul, a 6’1” blond Amazon.  She doesn’t drive because when she was fifteen she watched a friend get hit by car.  She’s been afraid to operate a vehicle ever since.  If she needs to go anywhere of any distance, she calls a Lyft or an Uber so she’s used to jumping into strange people’s cars.  I wasn’t even the first strange car she’d jumped into that day!

Part of the reason Rachel may be so trusting is because she is learning disabled.  Technically, she has not just one, but four learning disabilities.  That means a lot of things get easily jumbled up in her brain before she can take it all in, yet if you met her, you’d have no clue of the daily difficulties she faces.  Her learning difficulties made school and learning extremely difficult, but Rachel has never made excuses.  She has simply marched forward learning small lessons as she goes along. 

When she was sixteen, Rachel’s mother and father shipped her off to a boarding school in Connecticut that specialized in helping children with learning disabilities.  The family was living in Hawaii at the time.  I can’t even begin to imagine how emotionally difficult that must have been for both Rachel and her parents…but in retrospect, Rachel said it was one of the best things her family could have done for her.  Being surrounded by other children who have difficulties in learning showed Rachel that she wasn’t different, that she was unique.  And the school taught them all special tools to learn that make it easier to live in a world where no one thinks to accommodate those who have difficulty learning.

In Rachel’s family, college was the expectation so there was an expectation that Rachel would go, whether she had a disability or not.  Originally, she chose a school in Virginia but needed to take a break after a while because she was suffering from anxiety and depression, stemming not from her disability, but because colleges are a breeding ground for sexual misconduct.  Rachel has had men touch her without her permission on at least five separate occasions. 

Whether Rachel is aware of it or not, she exudes an energy which feels like vulnerability.  Now let’s be clear, Rachel is not helpless.  She has learned to confront men that cat-call her.  Part of me wonders if the thing I sense is not really vulnerability at all but the sweet innocence someone with learning difficulties seems to possess.  At any rate, I wonder if men feel the same energy.  I wonder if it draws in those with scrupulous intentions.  The nurturer in me wanted to reach out and protect her because when Rachel feels emotions, she feels them deeply.

She once went on a service trip to New Orleans to work in the food kitchens down there.  It was a trip that changed her life.  At one food kitchen, those in need could only take the food they could put in a crate.  Rachel was working the end of the line so she saw people having to make agonizing split-second decisions on whether they could take flour or sugar that week, knowing they couldn’t take both.  And still, Rachel’s job was to hurry them along like cattle, as if their plight wasn’t whether or not they would be hungry the following week.  At one point, an old man, who had his crate stacked up impossibly high, tripped and fell.  The contents in his crate came spilling out onto the floor.  Rachel wanted to help him but she was told to stay away, that if she left her post people would steal the food they had left.  So she stood there with tears in her eyes, wanting to do more, knowing she wasn’t allowed to help. 

That trip changed Rachel.  It made her more grateful for all the things in her life.

And Rachel has wonderful things in her life, too.  When she was volunteering at a local animal shelter, Rachel met a man working as a vet tech.  They fell in love…and now they share an apartment and two little dogs.  Last spring, Rachel graduated from ASU and miraculously found a job working in a center to help those with learning disabilities go on to higher education…just like she did. 

But the most remarkable thing about Rachel is that she doesn’t fully realize there is anything remarkable about her.  On the day we met up, she was just coming from a doctor’s appointment because over the last few months she’s been suffering from crippling vertigo…yet she still showed up because she’d made a commitment to me, a stranger.  How many of us make excuses to not do things we know we should?  Rachel has had so many excuses to not succeed but every day she puts one step in front of the other and moves forward.  I sat across from her really in awe of this beautiful, young woman.  What could we do in this world if we all adopted her can-do attitude?  The world would be a very different place.