LAUGHTER HAS ALWAYS been the best way I have to show people that I’m a human being. That actually I’m just the same as everyone else.
Disability can be so heavy, and something that people just don’t understand. It’s definitely different now, but in my school years, disability wasn’t something people were taught about. There was little awareness, and very limited visibility of people who were disabled. This can be very othering, and can also mean the focus is on the negative, on what disabled people cannot do. What are the limitations?
Laughter gets beyond these tired, unhelpful, long-established narratives that it feels like people with disabilities sometimes are just expected to receive about themselves. It’s because there is so much power in it, to connect, to defuse a situation, to shift the focus, lighten things up.
If I’m doing a talk, I always know that once I can make the audience laugh, they will relax and feel like they can relate to me a bit. We have found common ground, made a small connection which I can then build upon. Making people laugh, finding something that we all find funny, makes everyone feel safe. Making people laugh, with you, obviously, not at you, takes away the fear that can exist around disability, especially with kids.
That can sometimes be the hardest part about being different and being disabled – the fact that some people are going to be afraid of you. It’s especially hard when a kid is afraid of you; there’s so little you can do in those moments to change how they are reacting to you. As much as you might say. ‘Look, it’s safe, it’s OK, I’m fine,’ you can’t force that on a kid who is terrified of you. Which happens. You kind of have to accept that they’re afraid of you, which is really hard. But sometimes, even then, laughter can take the sting out of these moments.
If I’m making people laugh with me, and I’m showing the perks and the benefits of being disabled, and lifting the mood on it, making them see that I am a person who is funny and happy, I’m dissipating that fear and breaking down their stereotyped beliefs about me.
I also feel that it’s giving someone else with a disability an opportunity to not be judged as well; if they can see me do it, they might try it too, and see the benefits of laughter. Anything I can do to help others who have felt the weight of being different makes me really happy.
I have a story in my head about how people’s perceptions of disability go. I don’t feel I made it up; if I think it, it’s likely the majority of people my age will think it, or even the majority of people in Ireland. The story is that disability is always cast as, oh, that poor person. Or the focus is always on the things a person with a disability cannot do. And when they do something unexpected, it’s, oh my God, aren’t they incredible? A triumph, an outlier. I like to try to provide a counter-narrative. To show that I’m just trying to live my life like everyone else. I’m neither a victim nor a hero. Oh and hey, look, these are the perks I have because I am a disabled woman: half price nails, and I get to skip the queue in Disneyland! Like I said, laughter lightens things.
For me, creating this dynamic makes me feel like a person when people’s reactions to my disability have made me feel excluded. It means that the attention isn’t on my arm; when they’re laughing, they’re laughing with me, my arm isn’t an issue, and I’m taking control of the narrative, rather than passively receiving the reactions of others, the stares and awkward questions or incorrect assumptions about my abilities.
It’s always so important to me to not be the reason someone feels a negative emotion; I don’t want to be the reason anyone is uncomfortable or scared or sad. I guess it’s just because I grew up feeling so uncomfortable my whole life. I was rarely happy in my own skin. It probably is something I have to work on myself, because it’s probably restricting me from being the complete version of me, because I’m still, in a way, trying to people-please. But I would rather just be the reason that someone feels a little bit better than be the reason they feel a little bit worse.
As I have written already, when I was a teenager, being different was the worst thing in the world. But once I started to embrace it, I slowly came to realise it’s the best thing ever. I began to love being different. My younger self could never have imagined that I would feel the way I do now, but I love that people will always remember me. That my arm makes me completely unique.
When I was a kid in primary school, even though I hadn’t been othered, or picked on or anything like that, I was still aware that I had one arm and I always wanted to have two hands, even though I wasn’t really insecure about it or anything.
I just always wanted to be like everyone else. But as an adult, if you gave me the option, I wouldn’t want it. Now I am happy to stand out, I have become entirely comfortable in my own skin.
That’s been my whole life, people staring at me, and it can be quite heavy. But … if people are going to stare at me, what do I want them to see when they do? It is this kind of thinking that inspired me to get the tattoo on my arm, a koi fish and cherry blossoms; it’s for Japan and Tokyo.
I have always thought, wouldn’t it be class to have a tattoo sleeve on my arm, to make people look at my arm rather than trying to hide it? Look at me and see what it is like. It’s not scary, and I will no longer hide pieces of myself away, feel any shame. Instead, I like to adorn my arm, make it pretty. I rarely wear a prosthetic, but at an event recently, I wore a bejewelled prosthetic; I get to accessorise my arm. It’s what makes me stand out. People are going to look anyway, so now I try to embrace that. To own it.
It was my idea to create the bejewelled prosthetic; it was just something fun that I thought I could do. I had been putting it off for so long, and I just got to the point where I was like, fuck it, I need to do this. It took so long to create! I’m still finding diamantés all over my house. I still have the arm in my sitting room, on the coffee table as a piece of art now. It’s my accessory that I can wear at any point.
I lean into my arm as my superpower so much because I felt so negatively about it for so long, but now, as an adult, so many of the things that I do, and the opportunities that I get, are all because I have one arm, and because I’m different. My arm gets me places, and now, it gives me my confidence. It’s always a talking point, and it’s kind of weirdly comforting knowing that I’m not going to be easy to forget.
I love sport movies generally, but there’s a scene from one in particular, Coach Carter, that has really meant a lot to me, when one of the athletes, quoting Marianne Williamson, tells the basketball team, ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world.’
When you refuse to diminish yourself, you give other people permission, or even courage, to do the same. Initially, for me, it wasn’t about anyone else. When I started rolling up my sleeve at the beginning of college, that was for me alone, that was personal. It was a battle I was having in my head; no one else knew what I was doing, only me, and I didn’t think about how my actions might impact others. I didn’t quite expect the impact it would have on me.
When I started talking about my arm in interviews and allowing people to hear my story, and saw how they related to it, I came to realise that no matter how different you are, you’re never alone. There will always be others who have experienced something of what you have, and who will understand.
As soon as I started talking about it, I’d get so many people getting in touch to say, ‘I never knew that; I’m exactly the same.’ Messages from parents of kids saying their child had been hiding her arm and now she wasn’t, after seeing my interview. That’s incredibly powerful. It makes me feel like I am part of a community and that I’m not alone. We might not have identical experiences, but we understand how it feels to be different.
When I’m talking to kids, I always tell the story of meeting Danny, the lead singer from The Coronas, at an awards ceremony after the Rio Games. We were chatting when he gave me his email address, and said, ‘Get in contact, I’ll get you tickets for the next gig, just send me a message.’ When I was sending him the email, I wrote, ‘Hi, this is Ellen, the girl with one arm. I hope you remember me.’ He got back saying, ‘Of course I remember you.’
I am a disabled woman. And there are a lot of people who don’t even identify as disabled. But for me, it’s important to identify as disabled, because that means I’m taking ownership of it. And finding the pride in it, because in my experience, the things we’re insecure about become bigger if we don’t take ownership of them. No one’s ever going to forget me; it is my superpower, my arm. It is the thing that makes me different, uniquely me. That’s class, that’s magical. As long as you take control of it and don’t let it control you. Own it.
Ellen Keane is a four-time Paralympian, who won a gold medal in the 100-metre breaststroke at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. In 2022 she reached the final of Dancing With the Stars on RTÉ One. She is the recipient of a Lord Mayor of Dublin’s Award. Her first book, Perfectly Imperfect is out now, published by Gill Books.
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