Yes, I know I’m too young.

This post will probably sound more aggrieved than I want it to be. If my tone sounds overly snarky or bitter, I apologize, but this is generally how I am perceived whether I try to moderate it or not, so bear with me please.

In March 2025, I began using a cane – formally called a “mobility aid.” The reasons for this are complicated, and not something I really want to go into detail so publicly – Basically, my doctors had begun to suspect (and are still confirming) that I have a rare genetic neurological disorder that causes the muscles in my hips (specifically, hip flexors) to waste away, and certain parts of my shoulders. The rest of my body is still strong and fairly normal (which I’ll get into later, but is unintuitively a major source of frustration for me).

The shoulders have not been affected too much yet but are starting to. If you don’t know like I didn’t before this all started what hip flexors do, they are one of the main muscles involved in maintaining gait and balance. Other movements such as going up stairs, bending over, reaching to the feet, etc. Because of the deterioration, I began to get severe pain in my calves and feet and exhaustion I could not explain. I had begun to suspect for a while though – due to knowing my dad had this condition – because I knew how his symptoms started and they looked exactly the same.

Then came the fall.

I stumbled at home and took a bad fall in a way I could not explain at all. I was sober, I was not dizzy or anything like that, I just.. fell. Like my leg gave out in a way I wasn’t used to. It wasn’t my previous knee injuries, or anything, I tried and failed to maintain balance and my muscles failed. I also was having to walk a lot more each day due to a change in work location, and there were stairs to navigate.

I came to the conclusion my physical therapist had months before, that maybe I should just bite the bullet and start using a mobility aid.

I had used one before – I had 2 invasive knee reconstruction surgeries, the latest being in late 2022. It was not new to me, but I had never used one for more than a few weeks.

The first difficult part was answering all the questions and comments from coworkers. Friends, who knew me well enough, were never surprised to see me using a cane. However, this was new to my coworkers, and a fact of life is you usually spend the most time with your coworkers if you are someone like me without a family at home. Most of it was well meaning, even if it came out sounding incredibly bad sometimes –

“What’s wrong with you?” (I would avoid phrasing it that way)
“What’s with the cane?” (Better, but still rude)
“What happened?” (Hard to answer, but better)
“Hurt your leg?” (Hard to answer)

The best, by far, came from my CEO, who pulled me aside after a few weeks, and I’d seen him glance at it with a curious look –

“Hey, everything going alright with you?”

Perfect! Shows concern, while leaving the door open for me to divulge as much as I cared to about it – and ironically, was the one I felt the most comfortable giving a brief explanation. “Glad you’re ok.” That’s it. End of story. It’s been addressed, and I walk away with my dignity intact and felt better. But, by far the best thing you can do, if you don’t know the person that well and don’t know what to say, is to stifle your curiosity and just say nothing. For me, that was appreciated the most.

This was the first 1-2 months I would say. I call it phase 1 – adjustment. Out in public, it took about that long to realize all the little irritating things that come with walking around as a young-ish looking man with a mobility aid and without an obvious malformity. I’ll try to list them out as best as I can, in no particular order, with a comment of how irritating it is to me.

1. Stares. A glance is fine, I get it. First those bothered me, until I relaxed and realized it’s a perfectly normal response to a visual stimuli you’re not expecting. Old person with a cane doesn’t spark anything in the brain that goes “wait, that looks weird.” But it was the *long* stares that really began to eat at me. Sometimes I’d even categorize them as glares.

2. Comments – usually comboing off of #1. It would start with a stare, then a comment. I would say older people are probably the absolute worst at this. I want to preface this by saying this is way less than 1% of interactions – but since in a normal day you can interact or come across 100+ random people, the frequency was just enough to grate on me. “You’re too young for that.” The only thing I can say, and I only blurted this out a few times in the early months, was “Yea, no shit sherlock.” Like what do you want me to say? “You don’t look like you need that.” First time I heard this I gave a hearty fuck you. The worst one was an older woman walking near the entrance to my work, and half screamed at me – “You don’t need that, *I* do!” By that time I’d been using it for 8 months or so, I didn’t freak out (especially because I was at work), but said something like “Uh, no one is stopping you, I certainly am not” to which she let out a loud, exasperated “HEH!” and kept going. Utterly bizarre. I do not understand yet what drives some of this behavior, and when I tell people sometimes I feel they can barely believe it, but I promise on my dad’s ashes – it’s 100% true.

3. Rudeness. This is probably too broad of a category, but what I mean by this is, people who are either so unaware of their surroundings or inconsiderate that moving two inches or so to the side to let me pass safely without risk of falling is way too much to expect. It is difficult for me to navigate narrow spaces and I learned the hard way early on, if I try to squeeze in a tight gap in a crowded area, I may bump someone pretty hard, and I have a top heavy 200 pound frame. I bowled a kid over on accident once like a linebacker and felt super bad. Once I get momentum, stopping quickly is almost impossible for me. On top of the hip thing, I have the surgery knee and the ACL injury in the other one, so suffice it to say, I am not super agile (but way more than I look).

The most common one is in a narrow walkway, I will hug the far right side and use the cane on the left. This presents a tripping hazard to people passing me if I am not careful, so I’ll usually swing my cane to the right for a second and let them pass. 99.9% of people if they are also in the same “lane” as me, will instinctively move to the other side to let me pass. I don’t necessarily expect accommodation at all, but if I try to go to the other side, I then have to switch cane hands (because there will be no room on the left side of the path to plant my cane), take a few steps to the side (harder for me than moving forward), and avoid tripping them. The worst instance of this was a young, “I’m too hot to deal with this shit” young woman that looked me dead in the eye and fast walked nearly directly into me, and I stumbled trying to get out of the way. I had a really dark urge to trip her on “accident” but avoided it, and just shook my head and went on with my day. You’d be surprised how common this is, either by people not paying attention or feeling they shouldn’t have to move aside for another lowly life form. One of those things I just don’t understand.

4. Being overly nice – this sounds weird, but going way out of your way to help me used to make me really upset. Nowadays, I’ve gotten over it, but in the first few months I had this really obstinate “NO, I can do it!” kind of reaction. Now, I feel more comfortable asking for help when I need it, and feeling grateful when people do step out of their way to hold a door open or steady me if it looks like I’m going to fall. My conditioned has worsened since those early days, so it happens more now. I genuinely appreciate these gestures now.

5. Ableism. Holy shit I could write a lot about this. The amount of times I’ve been called a cripple – with an insane amount of casualness – could make me scream. Even people who should know better, like coworkers. I’ve just started to say “That’s not a nice word.” It really isn’t, and never needs to be said. It’s demeaning. And honestly, I troll a bit when I say this, but I don’t really consider myself “Disabled.” I can do just about anything a “normal” person can do, at least for now. I have certain limitations, but no more than the average person would. You wouldn’t call an elderly woman that couldn’t sprint or run a marathon a cripple, would you? Micro-ableism is a thing too, I learned. I can’t really describe it – most of it is out of ignorance, but certain stuff and phrasing has started to irk me. Even just today I heard, “get on the treadmill, everyone!” Ok I’ll get right on that. These are forgiveable, I am not mad at the person for saying it, it’s more the fact that it reminds me that there is a part of society I am not really a part of and it comes out in phrasing. “Standing room only” to which I now joke and say “Nah, I’ll sit.” Or how about, “It’s just a short half mile walk down the road.” “Oh, is that short for you?” This is petty of me and something I need to work on, for sure, and is not everyone else’s problem, it’s just started to bother me more and more. The more overt stuff, I just cannot understand. Telling someone to their face “Of course you can’t do (xyz)” and pointing to the cane like it’s evidence of something is *nuts.*

That’s about all the major ones I can think of right now. I probably could go on, and until you’ve had my POV some of this may not make sense to you. The world in general is not built well for people with disabilities, and you realize it in subtle ways. Oh, the only way to get out of this parking garage is 2 flights of stairs and a broken elevator. I can go down stairs fine – but the hip flexor is one of the major muscles involved climbing stairs, and it basically involves hoisting myself up with my arms and my entire upper body and swinging up to the next step, which is incredibly dangerous because you can (and I have) lose balance and fall backwards.

Overall though, I’m glad I started using it. I felt physically better and less exhausted when I did, and that tradeoff is worth it for me. Yea, lots of people may not see me as a viable dating partner anymore, which is dumb, but I’ve realized is also definitely a thing – but fuck’em, I wouldn’t want to be with anyone like that anyway. I also felt I grew a lot as a generally irritable person in having more patience with the behavior of people around me. One thing I’ve resolved to do, in dealing with ableism, is getting very fiery about competing physically in things I know I can still do. Right now it’s bowling – nothing in my bowling motion really requires my hips or shoulders much, and it’s been great playing a “sport” where I can prove I’m not physically worthless. Showing up with a cane and knee braces to these things is funny too, whenever you do something even slightly good everyone cheers.

I didn’t expect this at all. I had hoped my dad’s condition wouldn’t pass to me, or I would be married by the time it did, but life didn’t work out that way. You have to play the hand that you are dealt. I know I will play mine the best I can.