Expression on Wheels

Do you remember being ten? Laughter loud, racing your friends down familiar streets with nothing but speed and sunlight to chase? That was freedom then. I never imagined it would find me again. Not as an adult. Not until a blue, brand-new power wheelchair waited for me like a memory returning.

At first, I doubted it. A chair felt impractical, almost childish, a strange answer to a grown-up life full of schedules and suits and meetings I feared being late for. Then one morning, trapped in a crowd time frozen around me, I saw her behind me a woman in a suit, calm and unbothered, gliding past the line of stalled wheelchairs. One hand on the joystick, the other holding his laptop, as if balance itself had become an art. I knew, in that still moment, he would arrive long before I did. And something inside me shifted. That was the day I chose the wheelchair.

I didn’t know then that I was choosing more than transportation. I was selecting an expression. Wheeling became a movement with meaningful exercise disguised as joy, health disguised as happiness. Traffic no longer owned my time. The city opened itself to me, sidewalk by sidewalk, breath by breath. And with all wheels. I felt lighter less tied to fuel, fumes, and frustration. Soon, the chair was no longer just for work. It carried me to friends, to quiet cafés, to weekends that unfolded without urgency. I noticed things I had missed before faces, colors, small miracles at street corners. I could stop whenever I wanted, yet still go far. Then even that wasn’t enough.

I rode farther to mountain trails, to hills that burned my hand and fed my spirit. Up and down, falling and rising, not because I had to, but because it felt honest. One day the thought arrived, soft at first, then impossible to ignore: I wish I could ride my wheelchair around the world. And why not? Fear answered quickly. Oceans. Deserts. Mountains. Languages I didn’t speak, money I didn’t always have. Doubts stacked higher than any climb. But expression isn’t about certainty. It’s about listening. After months of training, I left. The road was hard, yet generous. Strangers became supporters. Cities became stories.

Sometimes I worked odd jobs just to keep moving, but I never turned back. A year and six months later, I returned home not the same person who had left, but someone expanded, someone who had learned that expression can carry you across continents. Now, I still ride. Still explore. Still listen to the road. Because that wheelchair didn’t just give me freedom it gave me my voice, my courage, my way of moving through the world. And if a traffic jam hadn’t stopped me that day, I might have never started moving at all.