“if there were a cure for your disability, would you take it?”
I am hard of hearing but I felt it was important for me to strain to read lips and hear this as best I could so I could transcribe it. It is not perfect!
“Recently I have been having some disability related angst. A lot of times people ask me, ‘If there were a cure for your disability would you do it?’ It’s true that my disability is a burden to me sometimes, but not in the way that most people think. I think that people think I would want to be cured so I could walk or drive or things like that. But really the biggest problem surrounding disability for me is the social stigma. People only pay attention to people with disabilities if they can use them as inspiration, or cute little sidekicks to boost their ego, but as soon as they get bored they just kind of pass you to the side and move on. I wish that people wouldn’t patronize me, I wish that people would be attracted to me, or not act like they deserve special points for being attracted to me, I wish that they would take me seriously as an adult because I’m 24 years old and people still talk to me like I’m a small child [laughing]. It’s not so much that I want to be able-bodied but I would kill to just have ten minutes to not be perceived as disabled, just ten minutes! Because sometimes it really does wear you down and it is really upsetting. You can’t just pick and choose which parts of someone are salvageable and make a new person out of that, because that’s just not how life works! My disability has influenced every other aspect of my identity, so if you…if you reject my disability, you reject every other part of me. I feel like the issue at the crux of that whole question is, wouldn’t you rather exchange your disability if you could have a wholeness of your humanity instead? But I would counter that my disability IS my humanity. Just because someone is disabled, that doesn’t automatically mean that their quality of life must be inherently less than an able-bodied person’s. I have more strength and resource and experience in my pinky than most able bodied people do in their entire body! My body doesn’t need a cure, society’s attitudes do!”