Alicia Fuller

03/07/17
RC 2001
Multimodal Project

I started off with the idea of getting inside the community of Poets, and no
not the dead poets society. But then I struck up a conversation with someone on the
bus that made me re-think my project. I am the sister of someone with Autism and
I am friends with many people who also have siblings with a similar or different
disability. The way we talk to our siblings is different from how we talk to other
people who arent disabled. This person on the bus asked me what my sister and I
talk about almost like we have strange or weird conversations with each other that
are outside the social norm. That may be true to some degree but we talk about
everyday things as well. I never thought about how I talk with my sister as being
its own discourse until I talked with this woman on the bus. So now Ive decided
to create a magazine on what its like to be someone who has a sibling with a
disability. Im going to write about how I communicate with her and what we talk
about. I will discuss questions people on the outside ask that are annoying to
answer and how other people treat my sister. I have created a questionnaire for
three other people that also have siblings with a disability for them to answer.
These questions will showcase this discourse and rhetoric amongst me and
my sister and the others with their siblings and what its like talking to others on
the outside. My questions that I have come up with are as follows:
1.) What is it like growing up with a sibling that is disabled?
2.) What is their disability? And explain it?
3.) How do you communicate with your sibling? What are your conversations
or lack there of like?
4.) Was it hard being their sibling?
5.) What is your favorite memory with them?
6.) What do people do around your sibling that annoys you?
7.) How do other people talk to your sibling? Do they treat them like theyre
stupid?
8.) What are some other things you would like to comment on?

With these questions I hope to identify the proper discourse of communicating with
someone that is disabled and how not to communicate with them. I will also
showcase how to not look stupid when addressing them. So many times I hear the
term Retard get used loosely and that word means the equivalent of the word
cunt to someone who has a disabled sibling and I am deeply offended by that
term. I try not to use the term Retard unless I hear someone else call my sister that
and then I respond by calling them a Retard. I have found this to be true amongst
other siblings like me who have to constantly advocate. I understand this will be a
hard project to create but I accept the challenge and hope I succeed.