First, this is an excellent and well done video, everybody needs to watch it!

I’d like to touch on my first experience of this video as it completely slammed me. It was used as an educational tool in a support coordination course I was doing, and as soon as the video was over, the focus was on discussing how NOT to treat clients with disabilities.

All I could think of was hey, I’m here too! Not all of us are non-disabled workers helping people with disabilities (PWD). The discussion was on how these people reacted to the video, and how to use it as valuable insight into one’s own behaviour. Me? I was emotionally reeling!

We were not even halfway thru the video before I asked – “Are you guys finding this as hard to watch as I am?”. I was having a really difficult time managing the flashback of emotions I was having watching the video. I started looking at the other participants faces on the zoom group session to distract myself from how I was feeling. Nobody likes being reminded of feelings of powerlessness and futility, or of lesser than, smallness; by having these exact same feelings come up again to be experienced!

Anyway, I watched the faces of others and immediately noticed a wide variety of reactions. The most interesting 3 types of reactions I noticed were;

1. Lived experience. There was not a lot of instant recognition in the group, but there was definitely some who had lived experience of feeling powerlessness as they were having trouble controlling the display of emotion on their faces and in their body language.
   
   
2. Acknowledgement that the discriminatory, exclusionary behaviour in the video was not ok, and feeling either uncomfortable with it (hello internalised ableism!), or offended with it, and definitely condemning such behaviour. This was the majority response I saw.
   
   
3. No visceral reaction. The video was educational, and there was no special emotional connection to it.

So back to me, because everything is about me 😂(j/k of course); by the end of the video I was on edge waiting for an unpredictable explosion which was predictable if the people making the film REALLY knew anything at all about this sort of lived experience. So far they had done an excellent job… so where was the explosion?

When it came in the form of “Kyle, can you please just shut the fuck up!”, I thought this was incredibly restrained and mild… and it was too! When you are subjected to so much of this under thumb for your own good type oppression so constantly, the explosion is much, much more unpredictable and definitely nuclear!

But… I want all of you to pay exceptional attention to the part that comes after the explosion. Jeremy says some very fucking god damned important things… and it is like he never spoke them at all.

Welcome to my fucking life.

Yours truly,

– deaf in Society