Why do friends drift away in hard times? | Mark Webb | TEDxKingstonUponThames

for those of you who are visually impaired, I'm a middle aged white guy, I have a purple three piece suit made especially for me, with matching purple hair and, the least interesting thing about me is my wheelchair, now like Ah , and purple is the symbol of disability, by the way, I'm not, I'm not purple. Normally, 83% of disabled people develop their disability and become disabled after being born at some point in their life, and I am one of that 83% now thanks to I think I don't know if it was nature or nurture, but a very positive attitude towards life, but mainly because of the incredible support of colleagues,

friends

and my family throughout life, I have had an incredible time and I hope to have many more years of crazy adventures and brilliant

times

so that I can easily give you a speech , a standard handicap speech, seize the day when you never know what's around the corner, don't pity me for all that malar, but Actually, what I'm going to do because I want you to have takeout, not pizza, but takeout.

From this speech, I'm going to talk about the

friends

and colleagues who have helped me in life and have a wonderful time. so that it is, they haven't walked

away

and I've talked about I'm talking about not being a stranger that you find when you're disabled and I'll do it, people walk

away

, so please don't do it. Don't get carried away, that will be the message, so my story begins in 1992. I was living in ES, a small town east of Paris and I was walking down the High Street and I had just passed the mini

mark

et on the left and everything suddenly , I was totally overwhelmed by pins and needles on my left side, so intense in fact that later in my life I called them pins and needles and they didn't go away for three full days, but since I was 23 and therefore , he was immortal and a Friend, I completely ignored him and, like I said, he disappeared and I moved on with my life.

Now I know that it was 1992 and that it was given away in my little preemptive um because history tells us that a theme park also opened east of Paris. in 1992, that's me in front, holding Michael holding Mickey Mouse's hand, the boss, um, but behind me, yeah, yeah, so I had the most amazing job. I was taking care of big celebrities and big VIPs and when you open a theme park. At the Disney theme park you have a list of celebrities now, Michael Jackson was a step up, now I know he got involved in Scandal later, but in the '90s there were three questions I was guaranteed to be asked: one is Bubbles, the chimpanzee, with him, there are no two. he sleeps in an oxygen tent no three he's had plastic surgery damn yeah now there aren't many people who can really claim that Michael Jackson has told him it's a small world in the back of the car but I can really claim that I don't have it on tape, but that happened, it was in my car for three days.

I looked after Clint Eastwood. Kevin Cosner goes crazy. Brilliant

times

. Fast forward two years. My second symptom appeared. Bladder problems. I didn't describe this in my um my um description of visual impairment but on my lap it's my it's where I came out of my belly in a bag but um in 1994 um I suddenly started developing bladder problems which usually involved a rush to the L sometimes I didn't make it, and this being France in the 90s, they had a very strange relationship with urinating in public and I could basically go anywhere, so I visited a lot of lamp posts, trees, bushes, gates, doors anywhere and again I ignored them. that and I assumed I was in some kind of secret sect of men who occasionally had accidents and didn't talk about it and I moved on with my life two years later still at Disney and my third erectile dysfunction symptom lazy Willie um now I love God I did It was or at least Floy, which interestingly it was, I finally went to the GP, the doctor, and he sent me to a specialist in Paris, who promptly injected directly into my Willie and induced a massive erection so big that I mistook it for My shifter in my car and drove home about 1 hour east of Paris and it stayed there and became agonizing and I had to run back to Paris careful which shifter I was touching and they put a cannula in my Willie to tear it down. the erection and then the specialist said, uh, look, this is not a problem, you see, you can get an erection, uh, it's just in your head, so take these blue pills and you'll be fine, and um, so I went on with my life.

I just um needed a blue pill when I wanted you know whatever um so I didn't prepare anything I figured every once in a while someone would get wet and I had to take the blue pill when I was feeling Randy um fast forward a good A few years ago I met my beautiful, wonderful wife, we had had our first child and were working for yes, the UK's leading electrical retailer. I was diagnosed. I was diagnosed at that time because my wife is finally not only beautiful but she is smarter and more sensible, more grown up, more intelligent and a girl, so she convinced me to go to the doctor and they sent me to a urologist, which is a specialist at Down Below, and a neurologist, who is a brain guru, and together they pretty quickly diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune condition, so it's one of those diseases where your own pesky immune system it gets confused and attacks you, and in the MS version of the attack, it attacks your central nervous system, which is in your brain and your spine, so in a sense, when my French specialist said it's in your head, he was right , because it was the central nervous system and he meant psychologically, actually, this was any nerve that came out of my central nervous system and could impact. and give me a little symptom chart, it was a tough time so I went to I took a couple of weeks off work to hit the wall, cry, cry, hug my wife, hug our little son, feel sorry for myself , drink a lot, whatever. because it is a lifelong condition with no cure and unbeknownst to me, the team around me had researched both the disease and the psychological impact I would likely face and the result of that is that when I returned not a single one of them walked away, everyone was willing to chat and joke and get on and treat me like a human being and that was a huge plus and a benefit and, in retrospect, actually a surprise, if you listen to too many disabled people who haven't done it.

I had that Now The Wider network experience from um my colleagues some people were great but others walked away others because I was no longer dancing on the table with a glass of champagne in my hand they no longer felt welcoming but more often than that it was not because were mean it was because they were uncomfortable with being uncomfortable they were so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they didn't say anything and walked away and I lost them as colleagues similar to some friends that they just disappeared from my life and almost at the same time another colleague in the same floor had a dead child, which I can't imagine much worse than that and to my shame I now have the excuse that I was going through an MS diagnosis and regretting it, but I didn't go talk to him and I regret it for the rest of my life.

I will feel that shame and guilt. Two years later, he had a healthy son and I'm happy to go up and talk to him and congratulate him and that's pretty poor behavior, but I'm afraid it happens and it can happen in um, if you're grieving, if you're diagnosed with cancer, If you come out on sexual terms, um. if so, if you become disabled, you will find that some people, because you are not happy, clap, enjoy life, people will walk away, so you know what the message will be at the end here, but anyway, I am alone.

I'm going to keep repeating this story at home a couple of no, four or five years later, my MS, which is a progressive disease, had advanced. As I remember, I was in the cane stage, but also in the chronic fatigue stage like in Forever. 20% battery and from then on I go downhill um and also the Cog fog stage um so um I have trouble finding words, sometimes I have short term memory loss. I have a bad thought that I can't, I can't for the life of I look at graphs or something like that that I used to produce, but now I can't even understand a basic graph and I was starting to have difficulties at work.

I was in a scor role and they called me to my boss's office and I feared one of two. I knew it would come. I feared one of two things. Or they were going to make me head copier, since in um, they

mark

you, you go to the corner, out of sight, out of mind, we are still employing you and we. I don't have to give a damn that it didn't happen or I could have gotten what I call the guilt check um, um, there Mark, um, you've got a few grand, you need to retire, go off into the sunset, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for your service, Sunny Jim, and we can forget about you, what really happened and I'm paraphrasing, but it's more or less correct, my boss told me, Mark, we love you, we love what you do, but you're starting to have Difficulty knowing what to do. we do it in terms of roles that will help you continue to thrive, but we will also help the business now that social media was emerging as something that wasn't just about Farmville or finding your ex-girlfriend, it was um, it was a real thing um and it was becoming a business tool, so we came up with the role of social media group leader for a company that employed 40,000 people.

It was quite an important role and we sort of invented flexible working before flexible working was a thing for the company cost the cost of an iPad £400 I could continue working and just work from home tweet from bed when I needed to when I was exhausted but it would still benefit the company and I would still feel proud and involved and it was just wonderful and again, something that just doesn't happen to a lot of disabled people, it was an imaginative and creative thing for the company to do something just human and not let me walk away, not walk away, so that's me, I, I, um, but Ric

hard

E Grant, uh, lovely. actor, he is brilliant on Instagram, he is vocal on social media, he is a lover of Life Adventure, travel, food, art, architecture and his family, he lost his wife about four years ago due to cancer and speaks very openly about his pain and I can remember that I think it was the Times wrote an article relatively recently and the title was First I Lost My Wife, Then I Lost My Friends and it seemed to him as if his wife had been written off by the actions and estrangement of his friends, so It's real and it hurts.

It really hurts, so I have a rule for both of our kids, um, which is for any new parent or parent-to-be, this is a good rule for being one of the good ones because it kind of covers everything, damn, um. but in terms of this, if I hear that a friend from school or a colleague friend from college is going through a difficult time, I'm very insistent that you reach out to them, support them, ask them questions and try to keep urging them to keep going. and get them out of whatever they're suffering from or whatever struggles they're having, so my message to you is, please think about colleagues and friends who you may have avoided a little bit in the hallway on Social Occasions and Don't Walk Away.

We love. company we are human we love hugs please buy us a coffee take us for a glass of wine invite us to social occasions talk to us at the W water cooler and if you look maybe there will be another tedex talk that teaches you how to win the Nobel Prize in peace. This won't win you the Nobel Peace Prize, but it will help some of you become better friends and colleagues with people you may have

drift

ed away from. Thank you so much.