Inspiration Porn: Nobody's Getting Off

    My personal experiences with disabilities are limited. Nobody in my immediate circle deals with any obvious physical disabilities, or any noticeable mental disabilities. The only experiences I have had have been through observation of people in spaces that we share, such as school. A more recent observation of mine was watching a girl who was in a wheelchair navigate the narrow opening of the bus stop in front of campus center, and watching the process of the shuttles wheelchair lift in use. A few things I thought about while watching this was how cold the metal on her chair must be (it was 14 degrees outside), and how early she must have to get her day started to account for the extra ten minutes it would take to get her on and off the bus, let alone travel time in the bus, and to class. I thought about how annoying it would be to have a class in a building just across the stairs near the shuttle stop, but having to work your way around the iced and salted campus, spending more energy than others who can simply walk down the stairs. It probably is nothing to her, she is most likely used to accounting for time that she needs, and she probably knows where every ramp on campus is located. But it made me stop and think about simple things that can be taken for granted when things are accessible to you. Anyone can become disabled at any time in their lives, so why don't we spend more resources to ensure that the world is more accessible for when/if that day comes? Even if we currently don't need it, a lot of people do, and one day so might you or me. 

    Learning about  Inspiration porn through this chapter's reading and the Ted talk presented by Stella Young was an eye-opening topic for me. I have seen many examples of inspiration porn online, and although I do find it impressive that people who have disabilities can overcome or reinvent new ways to adapt to their environment, it did tend to leave a weird taste in my mouth. And I think that Stella Young summed up this feeling I had when she said this in her Ted talk about receiving an achievement award: “I wasn't doing anything that would be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation”. 

    

This sentence applied to many of the examples of inspiration porn that I have witnessed online. All of these people, doing mundane, or normal activities, are essentially pitied so that nondisabled people should realize how lucky they are, and how that luck should not be wasted, and you should have no reason to not achieve your goals if someone who is disabled can achieve those as well. To me this has many underlying issues, this way of thinking about disabled people as inherently weak or challenged, or viewing abled people as inherently strong and capable, only divides us further.