Oh Hey! It’s Alyssa is a biweekly web comic series by Alyssa!
Oh Hey! It’s Alyssa #6: The Inspirational Award
A. Andrews
A. is a totally complete incomplete paraplegic and thirty-something hanky-in-the-pocket cartoonist weirdo!
A. has written 69 articles for us.
Alyssa, the ability you have to teach me, and everyone, such powerful truth with your wonderfully creative comic, causes me to feel such an emotional connection to you. You are our heroic mini-Xena and you have many skills for capturing our hearts and minds.
i’ll take heroic mini-xena any dang day! thanks!
This is awesome and one other thing that’s awesome is those LA Gear sneakers!
Your writing is beautiful and poignant as always, but more importantly: Do you still wear jingle bells?
i went back to my elementary school once maybe fifteen years ago and handed out candy canes at the finish line of the jingle bell run. that was probably my last time wearing jingle bells.
it’s an incredibly annoying sound. haha.
No argument here. I banished all cat collars with little bells a long time ago. ;)
OOF this is real. Thank you thank you!
Signed,
A Five-Time Recipient of the Most Inspirational Award at Basketball Camp
YEAAAAH BASKETBALL CAAAAAAMP!!!!!
Great comic!!
I was a person with a disability (not that I or anyone else ever referred to it that way) from age 11 – 20. I fucking love this comic. I love seeing my experiences. Thanks. ❤️
I love your comics, your voice, and your message. I am an occupational therapy graduate student with a disability, and your work is so good, I wish it was included in our coursework.
I nearly quoted the “hey, it could be worse, I could be you” sentiment in a seminar today when a classmate–who is studying to be a therapist for people with disabilities–hinted at feeling better about herself upon seeing her clients’ functional losses. The fear of being a bad disabled, as you put it, and not wanting to make able-bodied people uncomfortable, held me back. Even within healthcare and rehabilitation, ableism is still prevalent, and there’s so much to be done. Thanks for putting your work out there. Thank you for leading us to think more, and more deeply, about disability, hidden assumptions, and ableism.
I’m totally guilty of being a “good disabled” when I was in healthcare and perpetuating ableist attitudes toward myself and my patients. In my case, I was driven from fear over losing my job. I’d seen too many co-workers suffer a permanent partial disability from injury and get fired or tied up in court because the facility didn’t want to be responsible for its injured staff.
It deeply affected me in ways I never realized until I started reading Carrie’s articles on AS. Even though my accident was off the job, I was always terrified of being seen as “weak” and “complaining” and disregarded myself in that fear.
When I was able to walk again, everyone wanted to cheer my “can-do” spirit and praise me for how inspirational I was. No one cared to hear about my limitations or pain… and if I dared bring out my cane on a bad day it was like the inquisition.
Thanks for sharing your story too, Anastasia. I wish you the very best in occupational therapy! It’s a marvelous field and a lot of my favorite people at the hospitals and other facilities I worked in were in PT and OT. :)
If I go 20 years without hearing “everything happens for a reason” again, it will still be too soon. My least favorite most recent variant is “You deserve something good after everything you’ve been through.”
No. No. No. I both did nothing to deserve how my body works now, it isn’t a punishment, and nothing I’ve done means I deserve to have “something good” (which in this instance was visiting the family that I hadn’t seen in years).
Keep on keeping on Alyssa. *hugs*
The Inspirational Award is a simple way to acknowledge a person or team whom you find to be an inspiration in your life. This is the perfect award to give when someone inspires you to do something — like take up photography, try out a new workout routine or ask your boss for that raise you’ve been wanting. I have lessened playing video games after reading https://www.noobfeed.com/blogs/4694/impact-of-video-games-on-college-performance article because there are shocking impacts of video games on college performance.