Changing The Way We Talk About Disability | Amy Oulton | TEDxBrighton

[Music] thank you by the time i was 21 i weighed 21 stone his photograph of me cooking something that looks like it was going to be very healthy when i was larger i felt that the whole world was looking at me and thinking negative things i would never eat food out alone in public because i decided that whatever i was eating someone was probably judging me if i was eating a salad they were thinking yeah that's not what she eats every day is it and if i was eating a chocolate bar they were thinking of course she's fat eat a salad for the most part people didn't comment on my weight publicly but when i started using a wheelchair a weird thing happened people started treating my body and my disability like it was a subject open for public discourse the problem with these comments is they're very often dressed up as compliments forcing me into a position where i have to decide how to engage with this person who's obviously not meaning to be offensive to me people regularly come up to me on nights out and say it is amazing to see you in this club which was only legitimate at the time i swooped to the front of the long cure revenge two minutes before the cheap entry deadline and got 14 of my friends let in to carry me up the several flights of stairs although on that occasion i wasn't actually congratulated for being in a seemingly very inaccessible club i was told that you don't see people like me out having fun very often i was a bit worried that you guys might think that i don't know how to have fun so there i am goofing around at a wedding just in case anyone needed proof of that it's a regular thought one of not seeing me out or being impressed by my presence there was one man who on three separate occasions in on the bus route back to my house in new cross insisted on congratulating me for getting out and not letting it hold me back i can only assume that the it he was talking about on the third occasion was the very intense hangover that caused me to get off the bus when i could see my front door and throw up into a bin another favorite was a lady who came up to me in the supermarket and she bent right over me and she said you're very stylish which was nice until she topped it off with for someone in a wheelchair which did undermine the compliment a little bit it seems to come as a surprise to these people that i have hobbies and a social life and i love of dressing myself in shirts my friends said look like the inside of a 90s caravan the problem with these kind of comments is they cause me to feel both hyper visible and also completely invisible as a person when people project their ideas of what they think disability is on to me they reduced me to a selection of stereotypes based on the things that they've presumed about my life but my life and my disability is individual to me and there are so many things that you wouldn't know about me just from looking at my wheelchair people don't know that i fought through years of severe dislocations and extensive surgery and very poor mental health to complete my a levels and my degree and the after uni i had to move home be careful by my mum and over three years i wouldn't go out alone the first time i went out by myself in a wheelchair i was still at university in bristol and i'd figured out that if i parked between the two entrances of cabot circus that i could take the slope down on one side to the shops that i wanted to go to get the lift back up to the next floor and follow the slope down on the other side to get back to my car whilst doing the absolute bare minimum of wheeling i was so proud of that achievement but it had taken weeks of talking myself into and powering through the fear that if something didn't quite go to plan then i was just going to be stuck in the middle of the shopping center or have to ask a stranger for help exposing my vulnerabilities now when i look back on that time i can see just how far i've come in my journey to manage my disability and live the life i want to which leads me on to what most people think is my most impressive achievement going backpacking across southeast asia for three months it meant that like when i first became disabled i had to accept that i was going to need to rely on help on someone else for help for everything which felt like an uncomfortable step backwards at times but i got to experience things i never in a million years thought i would get to here i'm scuba diving whilst everyone else was gracefully easing through the water i was awkwardly doggy paddling around with my floppy paralyzed foot just trailing behind me and here i wheeled into a river to wash an elephant with a tiny bucket discovering that with my weak arms and my low height in the wheelchair that i really just gave the elephant very clean knees i also rode on the back of motorbikes and here i'd rented one with a sidecar for stability unfortunately i discovered that keeping my legs away from hot exhaust pipes is not a skill i possess and came home with two new scars to add to my extensive collection that trip is probably one of the best things that i can tell people about disability that you can still achieve the things you want to you just have to get creative about how you do it so when people tell me it's amazing to see me out they could well be right because on many days the fears i had the first time i went out alone in a wheelchair are still there and i may have battled pain and anxiety and fatigue to get there taken inaccessible or long-winded forms of transport or had to gain access by being carried like an emperor but if they think it's impressive because my life is otherwise meaningless and unfulfilled they're completely wrong none of these achievements are an indication that i've overcome my disability my disability and my mental health is not something i'm trying to overcome it's something that i'm learning to live alongside but our media is always really keen to categorize disabled people this as a best-case scenario we're painted as superheroes who have overcome our disability this headline from a real newspaper says superhuman and then some five athletes who symbolize triumph of will over adversity or we're painted as sad people to be pitied just two faulty genes derailed my life a mother on the great losses and lessons of her daughter's disability or possibly most harmfully the benefits grounded rhetoric workshy map of britain revealed thousands of incapacity benefit claimants found to be capable of working i'm none of these things and i'm a bit of all of those things disability isn't binary and most people fall somewhere into the spectrum of gray on a bad day i struggle to look after myself properly and on a good day i bum shuffled up a waterfall for two hours in lao so what's my headline if you had to give me one is it amazing wheelchair woman wheelchair user overcomes barriers to go travelling or is it sad disabled woman tries to escape her miserable life by going to southeast asia for three months or woman claims to use wheelchair but is seen halfway up a waterfall [Laughter] there are things that you can easily see about me like i'm white female at about 30. and there are things that you can probably quite quickly figure out when you talk to me like i'm left-wing feminist and gay and then there are things that you wouldn't know about me unless we were having a conversation and i told you like i hate coriander i put cold water in the top of my tea and i collect antique dog photographs my disability is part of my identity in the same way that all those other things are but this is where people start to feel uncomfortable because they think that asking about my disability or maybe even acknowledging it is rude and that it does the thing that i'm trying to avoid reduces me to my disability in many cases that is true someone recently came up to me in a shop and asked me what my condition was she hadn't even said hello and then who my specialists were and what medication i was taking which is a list i struggle to keep track of myself to be honest but we live in a world that is not particularly well geared up for meeting the needs of disabled people and that means that there will be times when that needs to be discussed these are two of the most common examples of barriers that i face things that will tip me out on my face and stairs so in the meantime if there are stairs into a property i'm either going to need a ramp or i'm going to need help getting up those stairs and crucially i also need advanced information about that because it's not possible for me to just assume i can independently go anywhere i want to go if we're talking about utopia that would be my end goal one where man-made barriers don't inhibit my freedom a utopic world for me would also be one where the presence of disability is so mainstream that people are no longer surprised by or uncomfortable about it what i want you to do is start by imagining disabled people in the middle of the action and then asking the questions to make that happen it's okay to ask me questions and acknowledge that there might be barriers that prevent me from participating fully but it's only by having those conversations that we open up the world to a group of people who are currently excluded from it to give an example of the right way to have those conversations on london buses there's often competition for the wheelchair space with buggy users and i get all kinds of reactions to my presence quite often i'm just completely ignored despite the fact a giant siren goes off when the wheelchair ramp comes down i also have had people make a massive scene of getting off the bus unnecessarily or refused to fold their buggy and share the space with me people also regularly do try to be helpful but end up moving into the space that i needed to turn my wheelchair in what i want people to do in that situation is just come to where we can have a conversation and say is there any way that i can help you here that paves the way for me to explain what help i might need without feeling like a massive inconvenience or a public spectacle when my disability makes me feel like an inconvenience it makes me angry but it also just makes me want to hide in the house access is about believing that disabled people have a right to participation and that each and every one of us is responsible for that the problem is it's a vicious cycle whilst disabled people act barred from accessing the world people don't notice we're not there and ask why it seems like some people are comfortable having conversations about my disability with me sorry to me but they seem much less comfortable having those conversations with me but making those changes requires discussions and a commitment to doing better when society takes a collective approach to making access a priority it stops becoming solely my problem thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 189,256

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Disability, Freedom

Id: 4WIP1VgPnco

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2018