Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal Quotes

“Before the world, we all wear a mask. Each disabled person I’ve met does this; it’s like a mask that makes you accessible to the outside world. We’re happy, our pain is bad—but not too bad. We take up space but not too much space. Our emotions are never allowed to stray into territory that might suggest the world at large has no desire to accommodate us.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“We want stories—we want enemies that we can face and defeat. But the enemy isn’t a disease or deformity—it’s not the hospital. Maybe we don’t even have one. The hospital can’t fix us totally—only we can do that.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Shut up, I have cancer, that means I’m real deep.” “Says who?” “Every YA novel ever written.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“You know people always tell you to have faith, but they never tell you what happens when doctors don’t figure things out. That’s when the blame game comes out. You didn’t do something right. They stop having time for you; stop believing your pain is real; stop trying. Doctors stop being gods and leave you in the rubble of their empire.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Before the world, we all wear a mask. Each disabled person I’ve met does this; it’s like a mask that makes you accessible to the outside world. We’re happy, our pain is bad—but not too bad. We take up space but not too much space.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“He thinks. Doctors all talk like that. Think, maybe, our best guess … Language meant to protect them and give answers to no one. Medicine is a hypothesis.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“When GPs want to play in the big leagues, my body becomes their ground to prove themselves. They stop listening to me, and even Mom has trouble reining them in.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“and at least when surgeons give you bad news you have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve mooned them at least once.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“The only disability is a bad attitude. I should make one that says Keep your attitude out of my disability.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Bravery has been my default setting since I was a child.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“The golden doctor is not always the answer to everything”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“If I had a dollar for every time someone told me they’d rather kill themselves than have my life, I’d never have to worry about medical insurance again.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“How can you live like this? His words cut deep, they’re as much as accusation as they are a question. But what threads through all his words is the underlying belief that the way I live . . . Is wrong, is somehow subnormal and therefore worse. It says my life must be so much less than everyone else’s.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“It’s a deep sense of betrayal when doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with you.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Because we all know that somewhere, in someone’s mind, we’re not normal. And we get reminded of that every time we step outside our door.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“You all need a crash course in how to live disabled.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“There’s no need to scare him with how much being disabled will make you an object.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Be you, not your medical file.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Hell, there’s nothing wrong with any of us here, someone just needs to tell the rest of the world.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Watching the rest of the world get on without you, doing the things you love while you’re stuck in this limbo of a place, is a real mind fuck.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Writers seem to have only two ideas about disabled people: we die or we’re completely cured.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“People are always willing to pray for you, as if you’re the thing that’s wrong and needs help fitting into the world and not the world that needs reshaping to make space for you.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“What’s wrong with me? Not a diagnosis, not an acronym that no one understands, but what’s wrong with me that I can’t find a way to fit into this world?”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Before the World we all wear a mask. Each disabled person I’ve met does this; it’s like a mask that makes you accessible to the outside world. . . Our emotions are never allowed to stray into territory that might suggest the world at large has no desire to accommodate us.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“There is no rule book on how to be a friend to a person like me.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Doctors are excellent at doling out pain, but they have no idea what it feels like.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“Doctors all talk like that. Think, maybe, our best guess. . . Language meant to protect them and give answers to no one. Medicine is a hypothesis.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“They [doctors] know numerous procedures and the science behind why it works, but when it fails? They pass the blame and wash their hands of your case. They’re not the ones who have to live in the fallout of the unknown.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“We’ve been through enough to know doctors get it right about eighty percent of the time. You have to be your own best advocate when you step into their lair.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal

“I love who I am, but that doesn’t change what people see when they look at me.”
― Gretchen Schreiber, Ellie Haycock Is Totally Normal