'Over time, this habit of deliberately divulging only certain aspects of my life did not feel liberating.'
One in four adults in America are living with a disability, but you wouldn't know it with the lack of representation in media, Hollywood, and the workforce. We're shedding light on the real stories — not the caricatures — of this dynamic and vibrant community of individuals. Read more stories from ourIn my freshman year of college, I made a plan to get coffee with a former English teacher, whom I’ll call Mark, during my fall break.
kept ringing in my head. Here was the one person who I felt respected me, but maybe he saw me in the way I feared everyone else did: A weird kid who was profoundly self-conscious. I forgot about Hegel and Faulkner, about all of my new friends and all of the new things I had pushed myself to do. I felt a lump form in my throat.“Even if you’re wearing a prosthesis, I still think you should be talking about it. That’s good comedy—putting words to all that.
Last year, “The Hysterics,” the stand-up comedy group I performed with throughout my time in college, began planning a benefit show to raise money for the last private abortion clinic in Connecticut. We wanted to draw a big audience and so we booked Crowell Concert hall, a venue that can accommodate over 300 people.
And so I began to tell Cam a wild story about someone who sought to empathize with me over my hand but had completely and hilariously missed the mark. Even with Cam, a person who had been my friend for most of college, this story felt deeply vulnerable. My hand was the focus of the narrative. Without even looking, I could feel her staring at my prosthesis as we talked. But at the end, Cam burst into laughter. “You have to do that bit in your set!” she exclaimed.
I was doing it, and people were laughing. I leaned in. I felt reassured in the fact that there was nothing I could do now. The hardest part was over, and now I could let the words fall from my mouth.Almost always, when people find out I have a fake hand, they brush past it because either they feel awkward or they don’t want to make me feel uncomfortable. But this isn’t always the case.
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