Growing up with a
disability was hard for me to do. Having idols like the Spice Girls and Barbie,
only lasted so long because eventually I took the difference of working legs,
and a slim figure to heart. Even when my grandma found me a Barbie with a
wheelchair as an accessory, I knew that Barbie would never truly have to face
the ups and downs that come with a disability.
I knew that other people faced similar situations as myself. However,
they were all men. Although when I was younger I was a huge fan of Terry Fox,
and Rick Hansen, I also knew that none of the men ever faced anything remotely
close to what I was dealing with. Sure, they had obstacles as I did, and they
took them head on as I have learned to do today, but they never faced theirs as
a young girl.
I wish that when I was younger, I had the guidance, or at least knew of someone
who was in a similar situation as I was. Growing up the only thing I felt I
could truly relate to was quite literally the Transformers series. There was nothing on the TV that ever told me
a different body was beautiful. No commercials with even a man or a woman
living life in a wheelchair. TV presented people in wheelchairs as the mad
scientist figure, like the scientist in Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, or a headmaster in a school for
super-powered mutants, like Charles Xavier in the X-Men series. Although I enjoyed both, they still paint a
disability as encompassing abnormality, and as a whole, something feared and
undesirable.
With the birth of reality television, I believe we have reached a new extreme.
Instead of highlighting the undesirable aspects of an issue, I believe that
reality TV over glamorizes simple things. Don't get me wrong, it is good that
disabilities and other issues are being showcased on TV, but when it comes to
reality TV I feel it is the wrong way to approach them. For example, there is
this show on television called Push Girls,
which documents supermodels that have suffered “freak accidents that have left
them paralyzed. While I do have some sympathy, for what they are newly facing,
it is not a fair judgment of what living with a disability entails. For one
thing, they will never have to fully deal with body image, because they are
still left with their model bodies they had before their accidents. They will
never face the problem of overpriced necessities, because their TV show and
modeling careers cover a substantially larger amount of the cost in comparison
to the average person living with a disability. They will likely never face the
problem of their needs not being met because of their State’s inability to
access or provide the materials that may meet such needs.
Because of this recent change in the representation of disability, I fear for
those who now grow up dealing with the same thing that I once did. Instead of
having next to no one to look up to, youth of today will now have many
different people, and with that many different perceptions of the way their
life should be lived. While that could be positive to some degree, it could
also have a negative effect. The media today is so much more influential than
when I grew up, and because the media world is expanding, I believe that there
is a big risk for the youth of today to lose sight of themselves. Being
constantly bombarded from every angle with ideas of what is normal, could
potentially cause an identity crisis between who we are and who the media says
we should be.
Having a disability myself always raised my curiosity as to how other people of
the world managed in the same situation as I was, and how the knowledge of
disability, had changed over the course of history. The truth is, with the
invention of reality TV, the true, reality of disability will never be fully
understood, and fewer people will raise questions such as, "do other
countries have the necessary resources to provide for people living with
disability. They may never know to question policies such as China's one child
policy, which not only eliminates the female population, but also the disabled.
Disability is more than triumph over "tragedy".
If there's anything that I have learned from growing up with a disability, it
is the fact that you can live without a hero. Surround yourself with people in
similar situations of yourself, but do not let their actions wholeheartedly
influence your own. Surround yourself with others in different situations, and
share many perspectives, but do not become overly dependent on the affirmation
of others. Celebrate what you've become on your own accord. Be thankful for the
family and friends that have supported you throughout life's experiences. If
you seek beauty, look deeper than what is reflected in the mirror and in the
media. If you seek a hero, look no further than within yourself.
