Lucy Grealy tells a story about not fitting in, unbearable pain that takes up residence in one’s head as loneliness and confusion, questioning what things mean, being scared and lost in your family, enduring intense physical pain, and most importantly, figuring out who you are. Lucy had no idea she might die, even though the survival rate for Ewing’s sarcoma was only five percent. She does not present her parents as overly afraid for her life, either. Her autobiography is not a story about the fear of death, but about such courage and anguish. Lucy shows how she falls under the spell of her disability, allowing it to control her life and dictate her future to a greater extent than it would otherwise. Having a disability means that sometimes you have to say "I'm disabled, therefore I can't...", but as Lucy finally learns, it also means sometimes saying "I'm disabled, but I can!” Through her traumatic tale of misfortune, she has sifted out truths about beauty, the public, and self-concept.
Lucy’s description of her early disease is particularly upsetting. Her family, overwhelmed by financial and emotional turmoil because of the stress of her illness, is not as visible as the part they actually played. Lucy’s mother was a somewhat blurred figure who seemed to disappear by the middle of the book and portrayed her father as a particularly vague individual. However, the day-to-day trappings of illness force her to rely on her mother, whose relationship is one of the most disturbed, and moving. Early on she comments that when she was a child she didn't understand that her mother's anger was caused by depression, but she never elaborates on this observation. Her mother compares being brave with being good, and says: "At a time when everything in my family was unpredictable and dysfunctional… here I had been supplied with a formula of behavior for gaining acceptance and, I believed, love. All I had to do was perform heroically and I could personally save my entire family.” Her words to Lucy to be brave, not to cry and not to give in to suffering and pain, only added to Lucy's burdens. Yet, one feels deeply sad for her simply because she is a mother with five children, a job, and constant money problems. She was a victim of depression even before Lucy's illness, driving into the city five days a week for Lucy's chemotherapy and radiation treatmen...
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...sfigured face. The book's title portrays that it was just her face that suffered, but in all actuality her body also took a pounding to her years of chemotherapy and the numerous facial surgeries. Whether it was years of chemo making her ill to the point that she never fully grew, or her hair falling out, she was undoubtedly self-conscious about her physical flaws. The multiple operations used skin grafts taken from her back, legs and stomach, and bone grafts from her hips. All of the transplanted tissue always dissolved away completely in her face, so she experienced pain and accumulated scars for nothing. On contrary, Lucy went on and did well at college and gained a reputation for being a great poet, but one last chance operation comes up near the end of the book and her response is moving, she says, "How could I pass up this chance…to fix my face, fix my life, my soul?" This statement alone reveals the belief that the extent of an illness can change ones life forever. All in all, I believe that Lucy Grealy did finally understand and learn to accept herself for who she is with confidence, but not without buying into the popular cultural belief of beauty and happiness.
Due to this disease the body is slowly broken down by affecting the central nervous system of a person’s body. The children depicted in the essay are probably an example how fellow human beings should be around a disabled person. They just view the disabled person as another human being and respect them the same way. The children are proud to associate themselves with Mairs and do not shy away from introducing her to the general public. This is what a disabled person requires: that all those around him or her should respect them for what they are and give them unconditional regard
The essays, “On Being a Cripple”, by Nancy Mairs, and “Living Under Circe’s Spell”, by Matthew Soyster are both about how each author deals with multiple sclerosis in their life and their opinions on it. Mairs’ piece is a careful examination of her experience with MS and her perspective towards her future. In contrast, Soyster writes humorously of a particular incident he had with MS and artfully weaves his ideas about the disease in with his story. In both instances, the authors share the purpose of narrating their encounter with MS to the world to raise awareness. Both employ the rhetorical strategies of appeals to pathos and varying sentence structures to achieve this goal, some more effectively than others.
People go through life wanting to achieve their full potential; however, many never take a moment to analyze what may affect how their life turns out. In this essay, I will be identifying and analyzing the three most significant points of comparison shared by the character Harry in Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and the narrator of T.S Elliot’s poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. The character Harry in “Snows of Kilimanjaro” has lived a good life and has traveled throughout many countries in Europe. Even though he pursued a career in writing, he is not well accomplished because he is drawn towards living a lazy luxurious life. While in Africa with his wife, he faces a huge conflict, which causes him to be regretful for how he has chosen to live is life. The narrator of T.S Elliot’s poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” enters the dynamic consciousness of its character Alfred Prufrock whose feelings, thoughts, and emotions are displayed in an
All these and more evidences used in the book support Peterson’s thesis and purpose—all of them discuss how having a disability made Peterson and others in her situation a part of the “other”. Her personal experience on media and
In her essay “On Being a Cripple,” Mairs describes her path of acceptance of her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis by declaring that she is a “cripple” in alternative to the more broadly acceptable terms: disabled or handicapped. Her essay is written with humor, satire, an open heart, and open eyes. Mair’s purpose is to describe her acceptances of her condition by using rhetorical elements and appeals, such as ethos and pathos, in order to allure her audience.
In the poem “Jamie” by Elizabeth Brewster, Brewster conveys the feeling of being isolated from the rest of society. By becoming deaf, people experienced bitterness, loneliness and anger, and eventually became a social outcast who is as unloquacious as a stone. But if we have desire and passion for our life, even we have disability; we would have a better life. Through the poem “Jamie”, the author also illustrates the importance of having desire for our life.
Disability is a ‘complex issue’ (Alperstein, M., Atkins, S., Bately, K., Coetzee, D., Duncan, M., Ferguson, G., Geiger, M. Hewett, G., et al.., 2009: 239) which affects a large percentage of the world’s population. Due to it being complex, one can say that disability depends on one’s perspective (Alperstein et al., 2009: 239). In this essay, I will draw on Dylan Alcott’s disability and use his story to further explain the four models of disability being The Traditional Model, The Medical Model, The Social Model and The Integrated Model of Disability. Through this, I will reflect on my thoughts and feelings in response to Dylan’s story as well as to draw on this task and my new found knowledge of disability in aiding me to become
Lucy Elizabeth was Russell’s symbol of strength, a pillar of confidence. She was a fierce woman who was not afraid to speak her mind, and when she did she spoke it in an educated manner. He may have been bothered by her strict ways, but in reality she was his idol. Her strength brought Russell and his sister Doris through many hard times, and her will to succeed and be the best was instilled in him for life. There are many examples of such strength in the text of Growing Up to fill fifty pages, but I will only list what I feel are the most important ones. One of the biggest struggles Lucy Elizabeth had to endure was the fact that she conceived Russell out of wedlock. Unlike the present day, in 1925 this was sternly looked upon, especially for schoolteachers such as herself. Her pregnancy cost her, her job and forced her into marrying an alcoholic with an overbearing mother. Lucy’s life changed abruptly a few years after Russell’s birth when her h...
Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...
With one in five college students experiencing sexual assault during their college career who wouldn’t be afraid? This remains especially true for young women between the ages of 18-24 (“The Realities of Sexual Assault”). While a woman’s freshman and sophomore year of college are when she is at a most risk for assault, it can happen at any time. According to Robin Gray in the article on sexual assault statistics, “between 20% and 25% of women will experience a completed and/or attempted rape during their college career,” (Gray). At Northwest Missouri State University for the 2016-2017 academic year there are 5,618 undergraduate students enrolled. With the ratio of male to female students being 44% to 56%, there are about 3,147 female students. In terms of the statistics estimated by Gray, 630-787 of the female student population at Northwest Missouri State will experience rape during their college career (“Northwest Missouri State University”). This is a disturbingly large figure. Women are not the only ones susceptible to these acts, but men are too. It is said about “10%” of all sexual assault cases involve male victims (“The Realities of Sexual Assault”). While this number is slightly lower for men it is often believed that male victims of sexual assault do not often report their crime due to the social stigma surrounding their assault. Men may feel
Every semester, a student attending a college campus will have at some point experience some inappropriate, unwanted attention. There is always someone at school who tends to make someone uncomfortable, be it through eye contact, persistent advances, or just uncalled for innuendos. Of course, we do our best to ignore it, or to just report the bothersome activity, but that can only do so much without someone finding a way around such things. Someone is always going the extra mile to get what he or she wants, even if it’s at the expense of the victim. We can’t turn a blind eye on our friends, our family, or our associates in these dark, sexual assault situation. Campus sexual assault is a problem with plenty of factors regarding it.
According to the Rape Crisis Council of Pickens County, one out of every four females will be sexually assaulted in their college years. However, rape counts for only seven percent of the college...
A survey from the Association of American Universities of 150,000 students found that more than one in four women experience sexual assault during their four years in college. Over the four year college period, 27.2% of female students are victims of unwanted sexual contact that ranges from touching to rape (6). Sexual assault is far too common and it is an epidemic that faces many students in college. Many students suffer from the consequences of sexual assault, which is a result of many social and cultural deficiencies, but it can be fixed through a multifaceted approach. The problem of sexual assault can be fixed through the education of the community, a positive and helpful school environment, and classes focused on prevention.
In this piece, Grealy describes the influence of her experiences of cancer, its treatments, and the resulting deformity of her face on her development as a person. She explores how physical appearance influences one's sexual identity and over all self worth. She also explores how one's own interpretation of one's appearance can be self fulfilling. Only after a year of not looking at herself in the mirror, ironically at a time when she appears more "normal" than ever before, does Grealy learn to embrace her inner self and to see herself as more than one’s looks or physical appearance.
In the essay “Disability,” Nancy Mairs discusses the lack of media attention for the disabled, writing: “To depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it may enter anyone’s life.” An ordinary person has very little exposure to the disabled, and therefore can only draw conclusions from what is seen in the media. As soon as people can picture the disabled as regular people with a debilitating condition, they can begin to respect them and see to their needs without it seeming like an afterthought or a burden. As Mairs wrote: “The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time.” Looking at the issue from this angle, it is easy to see that many disabled people were ordinary people prior to some sort of accident. Mairs develops this po...