A review by crowrey
I'm Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves to Get through Our Twenties by Ryan O'Connell
5.0
"I feel strange looking at their photos like I’m supposed to have found my tribe, because I don’t feel a kinship with them at all. It’s that feeling that I’m not disabled enough to identify with other people who have handicaps but also not “normal” enough to pass in the able-bodied world."
I inhaled this book in a single day. Special, the show based on this book, holds a - well - special place in my heart ever since it first came out. Being white and cishet, I never really thought about lacking representation of myself in media. And then I watched the first five minutes of Special and instantly went "Oh. Oh. That's me. This guy is me. I haven't seen myself on TV before actually. I needed this."
So I finally got around to reading the actual autobiography 3 years later and all the same feelings came rushing back but tenfold. Thousandfold. Ryan talks about living with CP in a way that mirrors my own thoughts on it to a T with all the joys of internalized ableism and the self-perception issues and the need of the outside world to pity you.
It's witty, it's clever and it shows what it really, truly means to be disabled when you're not the poster image for inspiration porn. I'll most likely keep coming back to this book. And I'll have to rewatch the show.
I inhaled this book in a single day. Special, the show based on this book, holds a - well - special place in my heart ever since it first came out. Being white and cishet, I never really thought about lacking representation of myself in media. And then I watched the first five minutes of Special and instantly went "Oh. Oh. That's me. This guy is me. I haven't seen myself on TV before actually. I needed this."
So I finally got around to reading the actual autobiography 3 years later and all the same feelings came rushing back but tenfold. Thousandfold. Ryan talks about living with CP in a way that mirrors my own thoughts on it to a T with all the joys of internalized ableism and the self-perception issues and the need of the outside world to pity you.
It's witty, it's clever and it shows what it really, truly means to be disabled when you're not the poster image for inspiration porn. I'll most likely keep coming back to this book. And I'll have to rewatch the show.