- Have you ever been sitting down and people come up
to you being like, "Are you OK?"
- Yeah, I've had that happen before, I'll just have
strangers walk up to me and start asking me
my medical history and I'm like,
"I don't know you, I've never met you before,
why are you staring at me?"
(cheerful music)
Hello!
- Hi.
- I'm Carolyn.
- I'm Makayla.
- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you, too.
- Do you know why you're here today?
- I do not.
- If I hold this out, what does it make you think of?
- Walking.
- Walking?
I have Cerebral Palsy, have you ever met anybody
with Cerebral Palsy before?
- No, I have not.
What is Cerebral Palsy?
- So it means that my brain communicates to my body
and the signals get messed up and my body doesn't
do what my brain is telling it to do.
So mostly it affects my balance and my hands,
and stuff like that.
- I read a book called Out of My Mind with a girl called
Cerebral Palsy, so I kind of had in my mind Cerebral Palsy,
is like you're permanently in a wheelchair.
And there's this girl, the girl in the book,
she can't speak either, so she had a computer talk for her.
So I kind of had that in mind, by looking at you,
I would not think you had Cerebral Palsy.
- There's different degrees of it, so I have friends
that they can walk without a cane, and they don't have
to use the wheelchair ever, and then I have friends
that are permanently in the wheelchair and they can't even
use the manual wheelchair, they have to use the one with
the motor on it, so there's different degrees of it.
I'm on the good side, but I'm kind of in the middle.
- You were born with Cerebral Palsy?
- Mmhmm.
- What did the doctor say?
- Well I had a lot of surgeries, so I had to go
to physical therapy and occupational therapy,
and then I did something called hippotherapy,
which is therapy on a horse.
- How does your day to day life get affected
by your Cerebral Palsy?
- I get tired very easily, so I have to plan out many
things I do in a day.
I can only walk a few blocks with this
before I get too tired to stand up.
So then I use my wheelchair, and then that means sometimes
there's buildings that I can't get into.
The one thing that I wish I had more of is more stamina.
More energy to do what I want to do.
- Do you ever read books that kind of glorify Cerebral Palsy
or kind of leave out the good parts?
- I haven't actually read very many books
with people with Cerebral Palsy specifically,
but I write books.
One of the things that I've noticed in the publishing
industry is that there's a lot more people who don't
have disabilities that are writing characters
with disabilities. - Than do?
Than do, and they're often not accurate.
So they'll assume that I feel a certain way
about being disabled, so I can usually tell they're meaning
something, like oh this person doesn't have a disability,
just because it's accurate or not.
- What are some assumptions that people make
on you right on sight?
- I get people who think that I have a mental disability
because I have a physical disability, which I'm not
quite sure why they think that, but then they're talking
to me like I'm a baby or something,
and I'm like that's not what this is.
When I was younger, I would have people come up to me
ask what my disability was, or why I was limping,
and I would just give them a completely ridiculous answer.
Like I would do an Australian accent and say that I fell
off the Sydney opera house and things like that.
- I mean it seems like you don't really let it get to you,
like what other people think, by just kind of making
humor out of it, but what is one thing you wish people
would know about Cerebral Palsy?
- I would say that people with Cerebral Palsy or any kind
of disability, we're not different than anybody else,
as people, it affects our lives, but we're just like
everyday people, so it's not like we're existing
to inspire able-bodied people by doing normal things.
Like, I had some guy walk up to me, and he was like,
yeah have you tried skiing?
And I'm like, I did I did it after skiing once,
he was like, you know such and such place, they have gear
that you can rent, so I'm making a mental note to go
to this place and rent this equipment, and then he turns
around and he says, "You would be so inspirational
if you skied, you would just inspire everybody."
And I'm like, great now I don't want to go, because I want
to go skiing for me, not to be some sort of sassy
thing for these other people.
- Is why you don't like people saying you're such
an inspiration is because by saying that, you're kind of
building a wall between people, able body and people
with disabilities, you want it to not be inspirational
to have a disability, you wanna just be...?
- To be normal. - Yeah.
- That gets a bit tiring, it's like, can you just interact
with my like I'm an actual human.
- I'm a normal person! - I'm not like
an alien from space that you're like scared of or something.
- It's nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you, too.
- Thank you, so much. - Thank you!
- Drop the mic.
On me, it's on me.