Photos by Curtis Myers

I’ve always just put them in a box.

Until now.

Click here to view more photos from the event!

Signing a book for Mark Andrews, the guy who taught me how to ski right after I lost my leg.

Here I am with Dr. Kimberly Dunsmore, my doctor from fifteen years ago when I had cancer.

Looking over my notes before my speech. That’s my mom and sister Anna sitting beside me.

To watch the full-length interview, including interviews with my parents and brother, please check out Brad’s website.

Unlike some members of the disability community, I was not offended by “Avatar.” In fact, quite the opposite.

I saw the movie with my younger brother. As we sat in the front row examining our 3D glasses and waiting for the movie to begin, my mind flashed back to a Saturday afternoon years before, when my father, brother, and I visited a Virginia theme park. We had snagged three seats on the front row of a virtual reality theater, the sort of hokey attraction where the chairs bounce and wobble based on what’s happening in the movie.

Several awkward minutes passed before a manager walked across the front row and told me that I “wouldn’t be able to participate in this experience” because my disability would make it unsafe. Adrenaline shot into my veins as we argued over whether having one leg would affect the seatbelt’s ability to restrain me during the show. It soon became obvious—with a crowd of viewers watching us—that she was not going to start the movie until I had left the theater.

I stormed out and began wandering the park, my fingers strangling my crutch handles, my palms sweaty. I envied the other seventeen-year-olds I walked past, all of whom seemed to be holding a funnel cake with their right hand and a girlfriend’s hand with their left. Stopping in the middle of a crowded plaza, I turned and saw that my father and brother had followed me across the park. I took a deep breath, but instead of sighing it out as I had intended, I began to sob uncontrollably. My father wrapped his arms around me and I buried my face in his t-shirt.

It was the first time I’d cried about my disability since I lost my leg at age nine. I had cried when I was diagnosed with the cancer, sure, and also in the weeks leading up to the amputation, but never after. I had always been afraid that if I started crying, if I started feeling sorry for myself, I might never stop. What would become of me?

So I suppose if I had seen “Avatar” before that afternoon at the theme park, my reaction would have been similar to that contingent of the disability community who was offended by the movie’s portrayal of Jake Sully, the parapalegic hero who literally jumps for joy when technology allows him to inhabit the body of a non-disabled human-like creature. People with disabilities, so it is often argued, shouldn’t be searching for cures or fixes for their conditions because doing so implies that they are in some way sick or broken; that they are, in other words, inferior. Should James Cameron’s hero rejoice at dodging his way into a pair of new blue legs? Should the character even feel the wish for the new legs in the first place?

The idea of a physical avatar—a way out, in the movie’s terms—is a thrilling or horrifying thing to those in the disability community, and the distinctions made by Sully’s choice can be troubling. This is the critical school of thought to which I belonged. But those tears at the theme park changed everything. Like Sully, I began to long for the freedom that comes with four functioning limbs. This is why instead of being offended by “Avatar,” I found it deeply relatable and even affirming, because also like Sully, I eventually found an outlet that provided me a measure of that physical expression.

In “Avatar,” Jake Sully transforms from a depressed, directionless parapalegic into a self-realized warrior king by taking the form of a blue-skinned creature and going to battle in the mountains. My own transformation took place at mountainside ski races in which I began competing during high school, culminating four years ago when I donned a skin-tight blue race suit and raced in Turino, Italy, as a member of the U.S. Paralympic Ski Team.

Next month, athletes from across the world will gather in Canada to do battle on the field of play in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Three weeks after the Olympics, a different group of athletes, those with disabilities, will arrive to compete in the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games. Paralympians are a lesser-known group, but the fulfilment they find through competition is no less significant—in fact, perhaps more so. Like Jake Sully, who left his wheelchair to win a war against oppression through the use of his able-bodied avatar, and like moviegoers, who are transported from their ordinary reality to a mythical world with the aid of 3D glasses, we Paralympians find meaning by escaping the bounds of our normal limitations and taking part in a profoundly physical human experience.

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