What Defines You?

What defines you? Is it your appearance, your character, or your actions?  For most, people, all of these attributes define who they are as a person.  Unfortunately, this is not the case for people such as author Nancy Mairs.  In her essay, "Disability," Mairs argues that people's disabilities define them, thus preventing their true complexities to be shown.

Mairs, a woman with Multiple Sclerosis, describes how she has noticed people's disabilities portrayed in media, such as television, are "the determining factor of [the person's] existence" (14).  In her essay, she explains a television drama where a young lady is diagnosed with MS.  Heartbroken she attempts to flee to live her life to the fullest until the disease fully takes effect.  She eventually succumbs to her reality and accepts her fate.  In her blunt candidness, Mairs points out that the woman's character is defined by this disability, and that this portrayal of disabled people is wrong.  "Take it from me, physical disability looms pretty large in one's life.  But it doesn't devour one wholly.  I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease" (14).  I could not agree more.  As Mairs describes, people with disabilities are still people, with complexities and attribute that everyone else has.  To judge and view them solely based on their disabilities would prevent you from knowing someone who could truly be a great person.  In order to change this view, Mairs suggests that disabled people should be put into media while being portrayed as normal people to make the disabled appear natural in everyday life.

Now about two decades after "Disability" was published, I believe that Joe Swanson from the television show Family Guy perfectly embodies how all handicapped people should be viewed and portrayed in media.  Joe Swanson is an honorable policeman who carries on an ordinary life.  He has a wife, a daughter, an ordinary job, and an ordinary group of friends.  Although he is handicapped, the show rarely shows this as a problem or even focuses on this aspect of his life unless in a joking manner.  In fact, he is usually portrayed as the hero cop who makes his non-handicapped neighbor, Peter, jealous.