Overcoming Obstacles Quote by Kitty O'Neil

Kitty O'Neil refuses the polite tragedy people try to staple onto disability. The first line is a blunt acknowledgement - "I know I'm deaf" - but it immediately swerves away from confession and into confrontation: "But I'm still normal". That "but" is doing cultural work. It exposes how often "deaf" gets treated as a synonym for "less than", as if normalcy were a club with bouncers.

Her next move is even sharper: she rejects the euphemism game. "Being handicapped is not a defect" isn't inspirational fluff; it's a direct attack on a society that turns access needs into moral judgments. The subtext is that the defect isn't in her body, it's in the system of expectations around it - the casting decisions, the infantilizing assumptions, the everyday disbelief.

O'Neil frames the real conflict as a dialogue: "People say... I say..". That structure matters. It names the opposing voice, then overwrites it. This isn't private self-esteem talk; it's public refusal, meant to be heard by an audience that has already decided what her life can look like.

Context deepens the stakes. O'Neil built a career in an industry obsessed with the body and with "believability", where disabled performers are often erased or reduced to a plot device. Her declaration - "I can do anything I want" - isn't naive omnipotence. It's a demand to be met with opportunity rather than pity, and a reminder that limitation is often something imposed, not inherent.