A-Z Disability Challenge | W : Wheelchairs

It is extremely difficult for me to talk about wheelchairs. Last year, the big contervesory was about the death of Stephan Hawking was announced, an artist made this beautiful drawing of him coming out of his wheelchair and basically walking up to heaven. As a disabled woman, I was very conflicted with this, but it wasn’t for the picture per se. It was because I felt like I had to choose between what I’ve always been taught and agreeing with the rest of the disability community.

The big deal wasn’t necessarily about the drawing itself, it was more about how a disabled person relies on their wheelchair to do things, like simple tasks around the house and/or getting out and having drinks with friends. However, everything just exploded into this chaotic thing that I really did not want to be part of at that time. Honestly, I still didn’t want to talk about it again on here, but I am on the letter “W” and there wasn’t anything else I could talk about other than this.

So, I’ll just say that my wheelchair doesn’t give me freedom. There it’s out and I can separate myself from the crap I’ve been feeling all this time.

I do think it allows me to do tasks better but I still feel stuck whenever I am in it. I really feel I am limited in both varieties of wheelchairs, as I’m either too short or too bulky! I have yet to find the perfect fit. Maybe this is what regular woman deal with picking out new heels! The second point I would like to get across is, it’s also all about your state of mind. I think after so long, you adapt to every different setting, and wheelchairs are a part of this too. You might get to do new or lose some beloved challenges while figuring out your surroundings.

Again, I have conflicting feelings about my freedom. I know I can never get away from my limitations. I say this not a sad note though, I like being able to test them anyways. I think this is really healthy! My family might not always agree with that statement, but you know. Honestly I would lastly like to say, I will believe what I want to. I have been doing pretty good on several other subjects throughout the years, I can add this onto the never ending list too! Even if that means keeping it in for a year and a half until I can find a clean way to discuss it on here, that’s what I’ll do.

If you’re in a wheelchair, whether that is full or part time, what are your thoughts on your freedom to be able do all the things you want to do? 

A-Z Disability Challenge | D : Dear Disability Community

Howdy!

For today, I am basically writing a letter to the disability community. This post is going to a very strong, opinionated piece. I have been keeping a lot of these thoughts locked up for a long time and I think it’s time to unleash them on here. So you’ve been warned!

I feel like the disability and feminist communities are fairly similar with the way people within it can be quick to judge you if you don’t agree with a certain subject. Everybody thinks we all should have the same feelings about the main topic that both groups discuss, like equality and you role as a human being. I’ve been thinking about the role and where I stand on the various topics that both groups fight for on a daily basis, but I’m mainly targeting disabled people.

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I think I’m an army of one. I’ve always thought that, because I was kind of taught that over the years. The only back-up I have is my family and maybe some close family friends, but hardly any of them share the same feelings as me, especially about disability in general, because they’re not in my shoes, or maybe in this case we’ll say “wheels?” It’s not their fault by any means, and I’ve kind of learned to live with it. I’ve become more of a silent advocate for the community. I don’t join a lot of the discussions of bigger topics, like politics. When I was in high school, we were taught how to register to vote and if you already 18, you were allowed to go ahead and do it in class. When I was asked to do it, I said no. There was a lot of backlash for it, one person even told me that I wasn’t allowed to complain if a person you’re rooting for doesn’t win because I didn’t vote. Fast forward to 2016, after seeing the chaos, I don’t think my vote would have mattered because Trump had bewitched the public into letting him into the White House anyways.

The second reason why was because I was afraid of basically breaking rank in my household. My parents are strong Republicans and being somebody, who supports the opposite committee or person, is literally the worse thing you could possibly do. So, I try my best to stay far away from politics at home and even online within my own community. Despite the fact that the majority of the disabled people out there, hate our President as much as I do, there are some very extreme people who will do anything to “stand up” for their rights.

At the start of 2017 I think, I saw a video of a news channel filming people with various disabilities, some of them removing themselves out of their wheelchairs, lying on the ground, and being carried away by security and police officers to jail. I’ve never been in a position to feel like that was my only option, but I was conflicted at the thought of seeing how far people in different circumstances doing anything and everything to plead to people, even making a spectacle of themselves. However, whenever a bill that contains something about disabled people, I am concerned but all I feel like I can do physically is pray.

The next topic I’d like to discuss is about the death of Stephan Hawking. There was a cartoon drawing of Stephan ascending to Heaven, free of his wheelchair, computer, and tubes, and he’s shown walking up the golden stairs to the sky. I thought it was a beautiful drawing, but a lot of wheelchair users were really angry about it. Immediately, there were arguments being made about being in a wheelchair is a form of being “free” and that the drawing just added to the myth that once we die, we’re free of all of our flaws: disabilities included.

Again, this was another thing that I chose to stay out of, because I did not agree with the disabled community on two things. Throughout my childhood, I was told by various family members that when we die, our bodies will be transformed if you will. As I got older, I began to believe this more and have always looked forward to that possibility. And the other was, I don’t believe my wheelchair gives me my freedom. Am I mobile? Yes, but I am not free to move around for a long distance by myself. I feel like I have the most freedom when I’m on the floor. Why? Because there’s more space to spread things out, I don’t need everything right beside me at all times. There are issues with reaching for things that are higher than me, but I always find my way around it.

I know I’m going to be attacked in some form by the words I’ve said in this post, but I still stand by what I believe and that is, we’re not all supposed to have the same feelings and nobody is going to make me convert to their way of thinking, trust me, people have tried their hardest to do this for years! I’ve heard many different sides of these two subjects online, mostly on Twitter and so far, nobody’s said anything to divert me in another direction, the only thing I’ve learned to do is hold my tongue and I’m perfectly fine with doing that for the rest of my life.

How do you stay out of the drama with your family, friends and/or online? Are there topics you do not discuss at all?

What’s The Point In Acting?

Hi 🙂

I have been wanting to write about this topic for a while.. I think it is a very controversial subject to discuss among the disabled community considering they are the ones who inspired me to even bring it up on my blog today.

I have been a lover of films since I was a little girl. I don’t think I’d ever become an actress because I’m not good at accents. However, if you were to ask any of my family members they would tell you I’m very animated and have a great sense of humor, but this isn’t about me per se.

My love of movies goes back a ways, like to when I was seven years old watching Michael Bay’s Bad Boys with my mother. I just saw the humor and all of the action sequences that I wasn’t really interested in anything else. It wasn’t until probably the early 2000’s that I actually remember watching a film and wanting to know basically everything about the story, characters, and the actors that were making these people come to life.

Growing up, I didn’t have too many disabled role models, at that time, I didn’t even know that many people or kids with other disabilities! I do remember the first time I was introduced to a disabled character though, it was 2003’s Daredevil the character Matt Murdock was played by Ben Affleck and as much as I loved him for that role, I was completely unfazed by the fact there was an able-bodied actor playing a blind man.

Prior to watching Daredevil, the whole superhero phase was in its infancy for me. It either happened while we were home for a week while I was recovering from my second surgery or after I was officially released from the hospital that my dad bought the X2 and I discovered Wolverine and I figured out that if he had metal in his body, that maybe I was a wolverine too! This was the start of why I love superheros so much! As other disabled and able-bodied people alike think that they promote ablism I have to disagree, I look at them and their stories as motivation for my own!

Let’s move on to recent films, because there have been a couple of films have been released almost back-to-back from each other. We have the adaption of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars in 2014 and JoJo Moyes’s Me Before You in 2016. I remember seeing the trailers for both of the movies just before they were to be released in theaters and I was more curious about the story itself than I was about the disability theme that both had discussed; you have in TFIOS where both characters have dealt with cancer and then Gus losing his leg through his battle with it. Whereas in MBY you have the lone character who is paralyzed from the neck down and is very suicidal and you have people who are trying everything they can to change his mind about ending his life again.

I had decided to read the The Fault In Our Stars after my sister bought it on my Kindle. If she hadn’t done that, I probably would have watched the movie without even considering it.  After I watched the movie I was still in love with the characters and their friendship with one another. I wasn’t following a lot of the online disability community as much as I do now, so I don’t really remember what they thought of both Shailene Woodley and especially Ansel Elgort, who plays the character with an amputee but I know they probably wouldn’t have given him any mercy. The reason why I say that is because when Me Before You came out earlier this year, the whole community erupted!

It seemed they were more upset with Emilia Clarke who plays “Lou” who takes care of Will (as played by Sam Claflin) who is paralyzed and in a wheelchair. I do remember trying to keep my mouth shut throughout both times this movie came out and I agree with some of the reasons.

I am over the fact that everytime we have a disability related film out, it’s over the lines of pity and sympathic to the people who are dealing with these conditions. People are stereotyping who we are and that isn’t fair to us, however I’m not exactly for the whole thing of bashing the actors who are playing these people. We don’t know how we got these roles. I often wonder if they were sought out by the casting directors and if that’s the case, that’s who everybody should have directed their anger towards when the film came out.

The last film I want to discuss is the 2014’s The Theory Of Everything the story about Stephan Hawking and this was the movie that made me think about what I preferred to seeing for these movies. I’ll explain more about that in a minute. I watched this knowing all about Dr. Hawking, but nothing about how he was before he was diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1963. I thought Eddie Redmayne was a brilliant choice to bring this person to life for younger generations to understand, because I know of Stephan Hawking as the physics dude from many talks about relativity and quantum theory thanks to my papaw! This movie was the reason why I wanted to read Me Before You before watching the movie because I wanted to see how Will is potrayed in the beginning of the book. Eddie is only a good choice because they show Stephan as a normal, “abled” person that Stephan was before he had the condition.

So what is the point to acting? I don’t even know if I really answered that question above. Just so everyone realizes, I do have strong feelings about actors that play disabled characters, whether they’re fictional or real people. However, I try to keep an open mind and sometimes it doesn’t bother me which was the real reason for this post, but there some shows that aren’t so lucky. I believe I have tried to explain my reasons for seeing the positive in the superhero or disability themed films despite the fact that there isn’t a single handicapped actor for these roles but as I thought about it I think we would have harder time accepting if they used CGI on a disabled actor if that role required them to be this normal person, so we have nothing to really complain about because it wouldn’t work out well anyway!

So what do you think of my theory? I want your honest opinions, but please respect that these are my feelings too!

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Lost In Paradise

It’s been a gloomy week. Our weather has been very bipolar as we get one day were it’s sunny with blue skies, of course the temperature isn’t perfect, but at least the sun is out. Makes things cheerful and everyone is usually optimistic. However, days like today for example is a rainy, cold, and miserable to get out kind of day. As much as I love my sunny days, leave it to these gloomy days were I feel like I could blog all day long. It’s strange how that works out honestly!

Where I’m in a blogging mood, somebody else close to me isn’t very happy about how this week has turned out to be. My nana had a little accident earlier in the week with mixing her tea and keyboard of her laptop together. She called to have somebody look at it and try to fix it, but after having I don’t know how many people tell her that who knows if somebody would look at it and figure out how to get the tea out, she’s getting a new one that won’t be in for a few more days. She’s been going crazy in a nutshell. It’s kind of strange that here i am talking about spilling liquid on a laptop and it’s my own grandmother. Something that you may not know though is that everything about her in the recent years has been controlled by technology and being online. She does these very amazing edits of her favorite: Adam Lambert. As much as we all make fun of her about her obsession with him and anything that’s related to him. She has really devoted herself into her edits and updating her Facebook groups of different subjects. She’s been happy, whereas before she wasn’t because as she continues to age, her body began to fail her.

I’ve been trying to sympathize with her as I don’t know if something like that would happen to my laptop, quite frankly I don’t even want to think about it. The last time we didn’t have internet for a long period of time was back in 2005, practically the whole summer of that year was spent in boredom. That is, until I found a very fun software program and that’s all I did for that summer was play with it because it didn’t require the internet to work. That was several years ago, I am not very good with two days without my internet. I’m starting to understand why my nana likes to compare the two of us because in a way, we are similar. We both can’t go out when we want to and go places. Somebody has to take us and that puts us in a rut because we have to ask, it makes us feel like children. Since we both got our laptops, the internet has taken over all things she used to have time for, like writing letters, reading books, and spending time with real people. Once she got her laptop though, she devoted her time to typing. So gripping things were basically put on the back burner. She can hardly write long letters or sew things anymore because she has lost feelings in the tips of her fingers.

The reason why I’ve chosen to discuss this, because nothing really made sense until I read a fellow blogger Scarphelia’s post about How Not To Completely Lose Your Shit As An Online Creator. The blog post was very much an eye opener for me. I’ve been trying to pull her back from always going to her laptop, hell even she’s tried but nothing’s been able to be effective. She wants to continue to help and create her edits, but she doesn’t know how to control herself when something doesn’t go her way. So if the internet goes off for a few hours she’s left not knowing what to do with herself. Once that settles in, she gets VERY angry with everything and everyone. If I don’t have internet, I’ve been trying to “pamper” myself and enjoy the fact that I’m unplugged from the online world I’ve grown to love. I read a book, color in my coloring book, watch movies, listen to music, and since I’ve saved prompts for stories and future blog posts I could try to create something by using Microsoft Word. I have all these things and my nana only has about a handful of things to do. I’m not trying to make excuses for her nor myself, because I know on several occasions I have had a look of boredom on my face, and my poor dad is the one usually staring right back at it too.

When you’ve dedicated yourself to something that requires the internet, that day everything is shut down and you have nothing to bring you back online. It is a scary thing. For a lot of people, if the internet is down on their computer. They’ve got their phones to update their social media sites. They are allowed to continue to use their stuff. While I was trying to slowly pull my nana away from her online life, something just happened to pull it all out from under her feet all at once. Whether or not keeping her cup so closely to her laptop was the smartest idea is another thing. I’m going to have one hell of a chat with her tomorrow, majority of it will be her complaining she’s had nothing to do or talk to, even though she’s got my papaw who would probably love to talk to her if she doesn’t bring up Adam Lambert. I’m taking Katie’s advice and separating myself and hopefully going to get my nana on the right track too from our online lives. We’ve got something planned to keep the both of us busy while I’m there, we’re going to go through old photo albums together. It’ll be a nice way to unplug ourselves from some place we’ve been spending too much doing.

Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown

So everybody I am totally excited! Now I definitely know it’s October and getting closer to Halloween, when ABC decides to reair my favorite Peanuts special. It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, has got to be the best one ever!! Linus is my favorite Peanuts character. He will always be my favorite.

My nana posted this on my Facebook account and I just had to blog about it. Not only is it going to play this week, but sadly on Thursday. Anyday, but Thursday. Why me? Thankfully, you can watch The Vampire Diaries online. Because I might just say “oh, what the hell” and watch it. I forgot about it last year. I was not happy. I’m not missing it this year no matter what.