You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?

The freedom people get when they are not disabled will probably never cease to amaze me. The freedom just to answer questions like this, to not be stopped by who they are when they try to do so.

Many of these modes of transport aren’t accessible to me, and those that require planning.

As a full time wheelchair user, an airplane is not accessible to me, it is simply too risky. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then you are lucky.

While a train is generally accessible to me, with assistance. There’s no guarantee that all the stations I may want to go to are accessible to me. In fact from experience, money aren’t, and this often determines exactly where I will travel.

While buses at least in my area are accessible to me, they are only accessible to me if there isn’t already someone in a wheelchair on the bus. One day, the people that designed for which transport might learn that multiple disabled people can and often do travel at the same time.

Certain cars are accessible to me, but not many. I cannot just get a lift off anyone. And while I can learn to drive a specifically adapted vehicle, to do get the vehicle would cost me money I don’t have. This is before I even know whether driving is something I would be physically capable of.

I’m going to just say that we bike is concerned, I cannot ride one and we’ll leave it at that.

You don’t travel to a place on a journey, you visit that place as well. Accessibility doesn’t stop in modes of transport.

The world isn’t generally accessible for people like me in various many ways. I don’t really get to explore questions like this, without an element of ignoring reality. There’s a word for this, which took me as surprising amount of time to remember at 3:30 am. Cognitive Dissonance.

I think somebody’s gonna read this and wonder why did I take it so seriously? It’s obviously one of those writing prompts like what would you do if you won the lottery? Reality isn’t really supposed to be considered in these situations.

But I’m not really good considering reality when someone asks me these questions. I’m not really good at the cognitive dissonance. I’m thinking about myself and situations I might be in. My disability is such an integral part of who I am and the experiences I have. That it’s hard to separate myself from it, even in the situations.

I suppose I don’t really know what it’s like to think as a non-disabled person. I don’t really understand what it means to have that freedom on any level, whether that be thought or reality, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Maybe if I had a bit more freedom, in reality, it might be something that would reach my imagination, a little bit easier. Then perhaps I could answer these questions as they were intended to be answered.

The only way I reach this level of freedom in thought, as I am sometimes able to reflect in my writing, is to completely distance myself from the thought. In reality, my freedom is always limited by the world around me and there is nothing I can do about it. As soon as I put myself in the situation, my reality hits again, and I am limited by it.

Please forgive the state of this post as my sleep deprived brain is unable to reread it and make sure it actually makes any sense at all.