[00:00] My name is Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn. I'm an interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, Georgia. People ask me today like, "If you could not be disabled, would you? " Yes! No one wants to be disabled! If you're telling yourself that you do, you're denying yourself the want to be like everybody else. It's okay. And let it become something that pushes you further. Am I grateful for my life? Absolutely. Has offered me a perspective in the way I approach life, approach people, approach art? 100%. People with disabilities are gift bearers. We give people the gift of understanding, and the ones that we let in receive the biggest gift because they not only understand our struggles, they go through them with us. Because what I like to remind people is that, before you leave this or your, you will be disabled, we're just the next stop in evolution.

[00:56] (Offscreen, Harper Nichols) "Have you had experiences with ableism?"

[01:00] (Jessica) "I don't think that you can be disabled and not." Like for one, for instance, some people are like, "how did you become wheelchair bound?," and like actually the preferred term is a wheelchair user because a wheelchair user uses that device for mobility. If you're wheelchair bound, that means you're bound to that wheelchair and it holds you back. This is what pushes me forward. And so they're like, "Oh, I'm so sorry." I'm like, "Oh, don't be sorry, you didn't know." I mean, I don't think people would willfully go there and say these things that they knew, you know, and that once again, goes back to how it's our responsibility as disabled individuals to educate when the system is failing to do so.

[01:38] You know, we from the get, like, make disability a bad word. And there's nothing wrong with being disabled. Disability is not bad. You know, society makes it bad. Yeah. But I don't think that you can be disabled and not [pause] face ableism. I mean, you walk out your door, you roll out your door. There's ableism everywhere, you know. Having, you know, a public building that has no access, that's ableism. Meeting someone at the grocery store, and them going "you're such an inspiration." I mean, it's ableism, but it's also … upbringing., and you can't really fault some people. I tell people, don't call me inspiration. There's nothing inspiring about getting up every day and going and doing the myriad jobs that I do because I'm disabled. Consider it a motivation that even though I am in a wheelchair, I work five jobs and you're sitting around doing nothing. Let that motivate you.