Episode 113. Phyllida Swift’s Appearance Matters 11 Keynote

So I need to insert a bit of a trigger warning here.

I'm not gonna go into the super gory details, but I am gonna show my face healing post-accident.

I think it's important, given it's a keynote, I often intentionally don't share my experiences nowadays, which is something we'll come to later.

But I think it would be remiss of me not to give you some of the backstory

of how I

got my disfigurement, which, by the way, is a word that I know is tricky.

It's not universally liked.

I like to reclaim it.

in the same way that disability is a tricky word, especially for lots of people within the visible difference community.

But please, if you take one thing away from today, just know that these are the words that afford us our rights.

We ourselves absolutely have to assert them and encourage others to do the same.

Not least, we all have the duty to counteract the ableism that creates that aversion to these words, and whatever the equivalent is for disfigurement.

I know people have trialed out things like facism, but it's way too close to fascism, and we've got more than enough of that right now.

So as I said, I very rarely talk about it nowadays.

So as Ella mentioned, I was in a car accident in 2015 when I was supposed to be volunteering in Ghana, 22 years old, and It was in the summer break between the second and third year of university.

We were driving overnight when we got into a crash at apparently 100 kilometers an hour, and we hit another coach and flipped off the road.

And our saving grace was a girl called Alicia who was in the front of the van on the right-hand side because the whole left-hand side had crumbled in, as you can see.

She flagged down two coaches, piled us all in, no ambulances, no police.

She had to turn the lights on at this hospital and bang on the doors to get them to let us in.

I was then put onto a metal table in the waiting room where I had my first surgery to stop me from bleeding and had a blood transfusion at the same time.

It was after that first surgery that

I took a selfie.

An iPhone screen seems to break at the most minor of inconveniences, and yet mine came out of the crash completely unscathed.

But it wasn't that shock horror moment that you might expect from a movie.

It was very peaceful.