Being Heumann

From the first page of her memoir, Judith drives home the idea that people must learn to view disability from another angle and develop an understanding of how disability might be a difference but is not necessarily a setback or something to pity. To Judith, disability is not a misfortune, and it is not something that solely defines a person. She acknowledges that without her disability, she would never have had the life she had. While her disability does define her in this way, she is not her disability. Judith sees her disability as something that pushes her to try harder, learn more, and fight against the status quo. She believes she would not have been the same if she never contracted polio because “[i]f I’d simply been a girl growing up in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t have been exposed to the same things” (202), and she has never wished that she did not have a disability. In the conclusion of her memoir, Judith urges the reader to imagine a world in which stories about people with disabilities were inspiring and uplifting, featuring people who do not pity themselves and depicting people with disabilities as the human beings that they are.