At some point in every person's life, you will need an assisted medical device - whether it's your glasses, your contacts, or as you age and you have a hip replacement or a knee replacement or a pacemaker. The prosthetic generation is all around us.
Giving up is conceding that things will never get better, and that is just not true. Ups and downs are a constant in life, and I've been belted into that roller coaster a thousand times.
The power of the human will to compete and the drive to excel beyond the body's normal capabilities is most beautifully demonstrated in the arena of sport.
When I'm curious about something, I do it full on and take it as far as I go, but when I feel like I've really explored it, I'm OK with putting it aside and going on to something else.
If we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have...it is our humanity, and all the potential within it that makes us beautiful.
I have learned not to overlook the advantages of being me. From when I was a softball player, and I held the stolen bases record. I would slide into second with my prostheses, and the girl on the base could either step aside or meet two wooden sticks.
Half of Hollywood has more prosthetic in their body than I do, but we don't think of them as disabled. You amputate part of a nose, that's 'enhancement'. You put a prosthetic in a breast cavity, that's 'augmentation'. But you amputate part of a limb and put a prosthetic there, it's 'disability'?
Success isn't winning every time. A lot of different factors go into every race, and you can't control all of them. Success means doing as excellent a job as you can on that particular day. The people I admire most aren't necessarily the most wonderful athletes. I admire the ones who keep coming back and doing it, time after time.
I think that everyone has something about themselves that they feel is their weakness... their 'disability.' And I'm certain we all have one, because I think of a disability as being anything which undermines our belief and confidence in our own abilities.
There’s an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I’m disabled. Truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I’ve had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions.