Teens With Cerebral Palsy

PlayStation employee builds a customer controller for gamer with cerebral palsy

Peter Byrne of South Amboy, New Jersey, has been gaming since he was a kid and had no issue with previous PlayStation controllers, but found the manufacturer’s latest edition to be troublesome.

Alex Nawabi, a retail marketer for PlayStation, responded immediately saying he would look into it, and after initially saying that the problem would be impossible to fix, the PlayStation employee mailed Byrne a care package which included a new modified controller and a powerful personal letter.

Everybody teaches you how to try to get better, how to blend in, how to be as normal as possible and “lead a fulfilling life.”

But nobody says the important shit.

There is no 

“Hey, fuck, you’re in a wheelchair and that just sucks balls, but you know what? You gotta fucking do it so here’s some things to make life easier.”

Or “Here’s your new cane! Congrats! Here’s how you use it. Stairs might fuck you up at first but let me show you how to make it easier.”

Or “Hey, you’re autistic, that’s cool. Let me know how I can help as your friend/family. I care.”

No one teaches you, actually teaches you about how to deal with daily life moving forward. 

Once you’re disabled, once people know or once you’re injured or sick or diagnosed or whatever, 

it’s all about pushing to get out of the chair, to stop using the cane, to blend in. 

There is no help to accept your disability and move on with life working with it. 

It’s like disability is the ultimate failure, even if they won’t say it. 

No one tells you how to make accommodations or what accessibility problems you’ll face.

Disabled people can have quality lives. 

But our lives are going to be different from abled people’s. 

Our health is going to be different. And so should our healthcare. 

But instead we are given the same treatment tailored to abled people, and that means it is going to fail us in so many ways.

This is also why “cure” culture bothers me. 

In the same way the body positivity wave tells people to stop aiming to a magazine body type and how they are beautiful at any weight, we disabled people should stop comparing ourselves to able bodied beauty standards. Stop trying to look like/ pass for able bodied. Let’s consider other criteria rather than harmonic features as praised in the western concept of beauty. Uniqueness, oddity and difference are precious too.

Author’s note: I am my own kind of beauty. I refuse to get frustrated because my legs will never look like Rihanna’s.

THROW ME YOUR THOUGHTS!

Well, I think everyone’s frustrated cause they don’t have legs like  Rihanna’s to be fair.

But I understand your point. I can only speak for myself so here we go.

So for the longest of times I would obsess over looking ‘doll’ like to “compensate” for my disability. 

If I couldn’t be normal with the was I walked than I wanted to be ”Perfect” everywhere else, anything that I could physically change I would. 

But the thing is I could never be “perfect” or pretty enough cause I couldn’t accept my disability as anything other than ugly. 

It was really unhealthy, not only physically but most importantly it took a tole on my mental health.  

I think the point that we need to make is not that we need to see groups of disabled people together.