This reading was about Brown’s journey to finding joy in life. It is Brown’s journey to being unapologetic in terms of race and disability, fighting the stereotypes and choosing life instead of allowing misery and anger to take over. Throughout the piece, Brown also argues that joy and hope are precious and that they need to be held onto and found in every day life. We must choose to live.
“Unfortunately, we live in a world that believes joy is impossible for disabled people” (117). “So I live as unapologetically as I can each day.” (118). “Instead of saying what I hate about myself, I spoke aloud what I liked about myself.” (119).
I personally did not enjoy this reading as much as I enjoyed others within this collection. I thought it felt rather out of place. I understand self love and choosing to live life and find joy is a big part of the disability experience but I felt like it didn’t focus on the disability aspect as much. I felt like I didn’t get much out of it, the takeaways are ones we hear as children all the time. I understand that it’s different in terms of race and disability but that wasn’t spoken about much in this piece. So my first takeaway is that we don’t always look for joy in life, but we should. My second would be that happy, colored, people with disabilities need to be made prominent in pop culture in order to end stereotypes that people with disability are negative and not embracing life because of it.