Name: 障害者がみんなインスパイアされたいと思わない理由 [CC] (Why Not All Disabled People Want To Be Inspirational [CC])
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:17:11.000Z
Duration: 12 min 2 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hello lovely people, and welcome to to today's video.

It's going to be a bit of a little ranty chat which we haven't done in a while

and in front a new bed.  You'll find out more about that in an upcoming video.

Today we are going to be discussing the awkwardness

of disabled people being seen as an inspiration.

The pros, the cons, the utterly painful simplified objectification of an entire group of people

that brings them down to just a secondary character in the life of whoever is saying it.

I have recently written an article about this for Cosmopolitan magazine

I shall leave a link down in the description below to said article.

It seemed to resonate with a lot of people so I wanted to bring it into a video

Please let me know in the comments down below what your thoughts are as we go along

whether you agree, disagree, kind of think both ways, you are  not sure how you feel about it either

I'm really interested to hear your point of view on this.

"hear your point of view" *laughs*  Idioms are funny when you are deaf.

So, being called an inspiration is pretty common when you are disabled - especially if you are visibly so.

[Clara, off camera: Oh, the sun it came out]

We have all heard the stories of disabled kids who won awards at school simply for existing.

I mean, the film Wonder has many great things to say about inclusivity

but, at the end of the film, Auggie, this little boy who has Treacher Collins syndrome

is literally given an award *laughs* for standing out.

And yes, I know you can say that the award is actually a recognition of his sterling character

and that's why he stands out and is so brave that he inspires others around him.

But if he didn't have facial deformatives would he still have been brave?

Would there have been any reason for him to be so?  The film doesn't really answer that question.

Although I guess it's little unfair of me to think it should.

I often say that I see the word "disabled" as being something that is very positive.

It's a recognition of the fact that the world is a little harder for you to move through

I wrote in the article about how my life before and after being diagnosed was essentially the same.

There is a link in the description to a video that explains my disabilities.

Um - but basically it affects my muscles,  soft tissue, organs, nerves, immune system, hearing, stomach,

My life was still hard, still painful, still exhausting but that diagnose changed rest of the world around me.

No longer did adults give me grief for what looked to them like "not trying hard enough."

Now, they made small changes around me that allowed me to fulfill my full potential.

So, we could argue that calling someone inspirational is just another way of recognising that struggle.

Something like "okay you have come to school even though both of your legs are disabled -

I should probably  stop complaining about that massive bruise on my ?chin? and actually finish my essay."

That wasn't really meant to be sarcastic. *laughs*

And then equally, if you ignore that struggle it can be pretty devastating.

Obviously, not all disabilities are a struggle, we are not a homogeneous group of people.

Different conditions affect different people to different degrees and we have all become disabled at different times.

Whether that's pre-birth, or in your late twenties or in your fifties.

So I am very much only talking from my own subjective viewpoint.

I have had it since birth and although it has got steadily worse since I was a child

I still had symptoms then, it was just that no-one knew what was wrong with me.

Then I hit sixteen, and my body went downhill.

To the point that at seventeen I was hospitalised with two paralysed arms because my body does that.

And I then had a lumbar puncture that went wrong and leaked spinal fluid out of my body.

My spinal fluid leaked out of its little sac and into the body

Uh -  it's not actually a little sac.  It's a surprisingly large one.

Cue horrific pain and sensivity to light, sound and touch.

I was in so much pain I had to be kept in a dark room laying flat in silence.

Fortunately I have a fantastic imagination and kept myself amused for many hours thinking up very queer TV-shows.

I'm also a very determined person and I wanted to finish school with everyone else.

So at the ?end? of the day I'd make my mother get me out of bed and take me to school.

I had to use a wheelchair and I wore dark glasses, and I had a tendency to pass out

and *laughs* I don't really remember much of those two years.

I don't really remember much of those two years other than... I tried.

And failed. I had to repeat the year, unsurprisingly.

But that is not the point of this particular story.

On the last day of the year, the year me and my classmates would be graduating and I'd be waiting for summer to beging

so I could do the school year all over again.  There was an award ceremony.

There are awards for seriously impressive things: the best all arounder,

best sportperson and the sillier ones, too.

loudest activist - I don't know why that was in the humors department, it just was.

The award of bravery.  Again you can probably see this punchline coming.

The headmaster stood on the stage, in front of the entire year group

we sat around tables, grouped to our friends

I sat at the back, in my wheelchair, not next to a table because my wheelchair couldn't go under any of the tables.

Oh, great, the sun came out again. Lah-di-dah.

It was the first time in a week I had left the house - I had even washed my hair.

"This person has taught us all a lesson about perseverance and bravery

This person has come through a medical crisis

and although they are still dealing with the repercussion they never gave up.

They have come back to class, and they have made the best of it, no matter how their body has let them down.

I'm proud to have this person be part of the school, proud of everything they have achieved and will go on to achieve.

and then he called the name of a boy across the room.

The boy who had been hit by a car whilst riding his bike had rolled over the top of the car and then miraculously

stood up on the other side absolutely uninjured - he was fine.

字幕リスト動画再生

障害者がみんなインスパイアされたいと思わない理由 [CC] (Why Not All Disabled People Want To Be Inspirational [CC])

struggle

panic

term

description