Top 15 Elsa Sjunneson Quotes

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that you could become disabled at any point in your life. No matter how perfectly your limbs, eyes, ears, and whatever else works, it could all change in an instant.

Why is it the business of the nondisabled to determine what it means to be blind, or the business of the hearing to determine what it means to be deaf? Why are people who don't use wheelchairs policing the visual of a wheelchair user?

Nondisabled people are the ones defining disability as a whole. They decide what is possible to live with, and what gets discarded as useless.

I was enough before ableism came for me. My dearest wish is that society will learn to accept disabled bodies as whole, instead of viewing disabled bodies as lesser than, instead of creating value judgements based on how a disabled person accesses their world.
Wholeness is not determined by how many eyes you have or how many working ears you have. It doesn't depend on which limbs work or how many of them you have, either. Wholeness is about personhood, and honoring the bodies of your fellow humans.

Not all Deafblind people are nonverbal. Not all Deafblind people are completely blind, or completely Deaf. Not all Deafblind people use tactile sign like Helen did.

There is a burning fire in my chest every single day, and it has been there since I was a little girl. And I think that that rage comes from existing in a world that wants to define me constantly based on their own decisions of who I should be.

It was necessary to write this book, because so much of our media are teaching people what disability is looking like, and a lot of that perpetuates harmful, incorrect stereotypes.

On why she wrote her memoir, Being Seen

We need more disabled creators in the media, but it is the viewer's responsibility to think through what they are seeing and not just aimlessly consume. It is their job to ask questions and go to the source. Start by asking, 'Have I ever actually talked to a blind person?'

She couldn’t hear voices. But if she were to lay next to a piano and someone were to use the bass pedal, she describes what it was like to hear that sound. Yeah, so it’s not a lot of hearing. But it’s enough hearing that she was able to know what hearing felt like.

On Helen Keller's residual hearing

I do think that hearing from her is important. By letting the mythology of William Gibson be the only record that we teach kids, we’re letting a man tell us what a woman’s life was like, and not just any man, we’re talking about a non disabled man.

You must ask who’s telling the story and what their angle is.

She knew she had a voice and a platform. It’s not like she didn’t know that when she wrote for The New Republic. She knew that people listened to her, and she made a decision to throw a different type of disability under the bus. And that’s not really something that I can say was okay.

On Helen Keller's support for eugenics

We're haunting the world because it's not entirely ours and we scare people, but we also get to be here because it's our world too.

How do we come to you now in the body that you're already in?

Snark lets me be funny while shoving the knife in. It takes a little bit of the edge away. So the people don't always notice that I'm using a scalpel.