I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much

Stella Young is a comedian and journalist who happens to go about her day in a wheelchair — a fact that doesn’t, she’d like to make clear, automatically turn her into a noble inspiration to all humanity. In this very funny talk, Young breaks down society's habit of turning disabled people into “inspiration porn.”

I grew up in a very small country town

in Victoria.

I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing.

I went to school, I hung out with my friends,

I fought with my younger sisters.

It was all very normal.

And when I was 15, a member of my local community

approached my parents

and wanted to nominate me

for a community achievement award.

And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice,

but there's kind of one glaring problem with that.

She hasn't actually achieved anything." (Laughter)

And they were right, you know.

I went to school, I got good marks,

I had a very low-key after school job

in my mum's hairdressing salon,

and I spent a lot of time watching

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek."

Yeah, I know. What a contradiction.

But they were right, you know.

I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary

at all.

I wasn't doing anything that could
be considered an achievement

if you took disability out of the equation.

Years later, I was on my second teaching round

in a Melbourne high school,

and I was about 20 minutes into
a year 11 legal studies class

when this boy put up his hand and said,

"Hey miss, when are you going
to start doing your speech?"

And I said, "What speech?"

You know, I'd been talking them

about defamation law for a good 20 minutes.

And he said, "You know, like,

your motivational speaking.

You know, when people in
wheelchairs come to school,

they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?"

(Laughter)

"It's usually in the big hall."

And that's when it dawned on me:

This kid had only ever experienced disabled people

as objects of inspiration.

We are not, to this kid --

and it's not his fault, I mean,

that's true for many of us.

For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers

or our doctors or our manicurists.

We're not real people. We are there to inspire.

And in fact, I am sitting on this stage

looking like I do in this wheelchair,

and you are probably kind of expecting me

to inspire you. Right? (Laughter)

Yeah.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid

I'm going to disappoint you dramatically.

I am not here to inspire you.

I am here to tell you that we have been lied to

about disability.

Yeah, we've been sold the lie

that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T.

It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability

makes you exceptional.

It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't

make you exceptional.

And in the past few years, we've been able

to propagate this lie even further

via social media.

You may have seen images like this one:

"The only disability in life is a bad attitude."

Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed.

Or this one: "Before you quit, try!"

These are just a couple of examples,

but there are a lot of these images out there.

You know, you might have seen the one,

the little girl with no hands

drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth.

You might have seen a child running

on carbon fiber prosthetic legs.

And these images,

there are lots of them out there,

they are what we call inspiration porn.

(Laughter)

And I use the term porn deliberately,

because they objectify one group of people

for the benefit of another group of people.

So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people

for the benefit of nondisabled people.

The purpose of these images

is to inspire you, to motivate you,

so that we can look at them

and think, "Well, however bad my life is,

it could be worse.

I could be that person."

But what if you are that person?

I've lost count of the number of times that I've

been approached by strangers

wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave

or inspirational,

and this was long before my work

had any kind of public profile.

They were just kind of congratulating me

for managing to get up in the morning

and remember my own name. (Laughter)

And it is objectifying.

These images, those images

objectify disabled people

for the benefit of nondisabled people.

They are there so that you can look at them

and think that things aren't so bad for you,

to put your worries into perspective.

And life as a disabled person

is actually somewhat difficult.

We do overcome some things.

But the things that we're overcoming

are not the things that you think they are.

They are not things to do with our bodies.

I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately,

because I subscribe to what's called
the social model of disability,

which tells us that we are more disabled

by the society that we live in

than by our bodies and our diagnoses.

So I have lived in this body a long time.

I'm quite fond of it.

It does the things that I need it to do,

and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity

just as you have,

and that's the thing about those
kids in those pictures as well.

They're not doing anything out of the ordinary.

They are just using their bodies

to the best of their capacity.

So is it really fair to objectify them

in the way that we do,

to share those images?

People, when they say, "You're an inspiration,"

they mean it as a compliment.

And I know why it happens.

It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold

this lie that disability makes you exceptional.

And it honestly doesn't.

And I know what you're thinking.

You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration,

and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella,

aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?"

And the thing is, I am.

I learn from other disabled people all the time.

I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though.

I am learning that it's a genius idea

to use a pair of barbecue tongs

to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter)

I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge

your mobile phone battery from your chair battery.

Genius.

We are learning from each
others' strength and endurance,

not against our bodies and our diagnoses,

but against a world that exceptionalizes

and objectifies us.

I really think that this lie that we've been sold

about disability is the greatest injustice.

It makes life hard for us.

And that quote, "The only disability in life

is a bad attitude,"

the reason that that's bullshit

is because it's just not true,

because of the social model of disability.

No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs

has ever made it turn into a ramp.

Never. (Laughter) (Applause)

Smiling at a television screen

isn't going to make closed captions appear

for people who are deaf.

No amount of standing
in the middle of a bookshop

and radiating a positive attitude

is going to turn all those books into braille.

It's just not going to happen.

I really want to live in a world

where disability is not the exception, but the norm.

I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl

sitting in her bedroom

watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

isn't referred to as achieving anything

because she's doing it sitting down.

I want to live in a world

where we don't have such low expectations

of disabled people

that we are congratulated for getting out of bed

and remembering our own names in the morning.

I want to live in a world where
we value genuine achievement

for disabled people,

and I want to live in a world

where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school

is not one bit surprised

that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.

Disability doesn't make you exceptional,

but questioning what you
think you know about it does.

Thank you.

(Applause)