Scrappy Misfit

Dr. Rebekah Taussig envisions a world built for people on the edges

 

 

Living in a body that looks and moves differently than most, Dr. Rebekah Taussig learned a lot about herself and how she fit, and didn’t fit, within a world designed for the average person.

But what exactly is average?

Dr. Taussig is a mom, a wife, an educator, a disability advocate and a self-proclaimed scrappy misfit. She is an award-winning author of the best-selling memoir, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, and a recently published children’s book called, We Are the Scrappy Ones. She hosts workshops and speaks at institutions and organizations across the nation, including the University of Michigan, Yale University and Johnson & Johnson.

Dr. Taussig visited Delta College on March 19 for the President’s Speaker Series where she challenged us to think bigger and more critically about what average looks like and the barriers that bar others from inclusion. 

“I spent a lot of time on the edges of inaccessible playgrounds, the ends of lunch tables, and inaccessible birthday parties. I felt the friction and inconveniences that came with simply trying to exist in public—for me or anyone with me,” Taussig reflects. “It felt elaborate. It felt disruptive, always having to leave the group to find a different route. I eventually pieced together that disability meant you’re on the outside.”

To fit in the best she could, Taussig learned to make her needs very small. She went with the flow and didn’t make a fuss. She pretended that inaccessibility didn’t cost her anything, even when she had to be carried to join an event that required climbing a few flights of stairs.

These days, Dr. Taussig rarely views her disability as “the problem,” and she credits this deep shift in perspective to a line of text she came across by Lennard Davis that read, “Disability is not an object—a woman with a cane—but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses.” She described these words as an overwhelmingly emotional experience, because, for the first time, she realized that there was not something “fundamentally broken or ill-fitting” about her. Rather, it’s the way in which the world is designed that pushes her to the edges. 

“What group averages don’t give us is meaningful insight about individual people,” argues Taussig. “When we keep disability on the edges, it leaves us all less-equipped—building worlds that are accessible to only a few of us, and only temporarily. When we build the world to include the people on the edges, we build sturdier designs and more sustainable solutions for all of us.”