Ryan O’Connell Discusses Self-Acceptance

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: When you’re living with a disability, it can be difficult not to let it define you, especially if people treat you differently, right? And comedian Ryan O’Connell is warm, outspoken, and relatable. He’s also gay and has cerebral palsy, a lifelong condition which affects movement and coordination. They are all themes that are explored in his new Netflix show “Special” which is based on his own life. And he sat down with our Alicia Menendez to discuss it.

ALICIA MENENDEZ: All right. Thank you so much for being here.

RYAN O’CONNELL, CREATOR AND ACTOR, “SPECIAL”: Thank you for having me.

MENENDEZ: So this show that you star in, produce, write for, “Special” follows the life of a 28-year-old gay man who has cerebral palsy. How much of this is based on your own life?

O’CONNELL: It depends on the day. I feel like some days, I’m like, this is me. This is like all I had to give, like blood, sweat, and tears and others. I’m like, I don’t really know this bitch.

MENENDEZ: Yes, but biographically it follows your life a bit?

O’CONNELL: Yes, it does. Like the inciting incident of me getting hit by a car and then lying about my cerebral palsy and being an accent victim, that actually happened, yes.

MENENDEZ: I want to take a look at one of the opening scenes from the show.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARSON WHITE, ACTOR, “SPECIAL”: Do you need help? I can go get my parents for you.

O’CONNELL: Nope, I’m fine.

WHITE: Hey, you’re walking funny. You need to go to the hospital Mister.

O’CONNELL: That’s not from my fall. I have a thing. It’s called cerebral palsy.

WHITE: What’s that?

O’CONNELL: Cerebral palsy is a disability resulting from damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after birth, and that will be manifested through muscular incoordination.

WHITE: (screams)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MENENDEZ: So I promise not to do that to you. But for someone who is watching and doesn’t know, understanding that you have clearly explained it a million times over the course of your life. How would you explain what it is?

O’CONNELL: Yes, I would explain it just — yes, cerebral palsy — well, now I feel like I don’t explain it. I’m like done explaining. Because I get asked of it so often that I’m just like, “I have CP,” and they’re like, “What’s that?” I’m like, “I don’t know, Google it.” It’s just — it gets exhausting. I think it’s such a part of my life that — I mean, I was actually just in an Uber recently with my boyfriend and the Uber guy turned around and just said, “What’s wrong with you?” And I remember my boyfriend was so shook, and to me it was just like normal every day. I just — I don’t know, I didn’t even realize that that would be a strange thing. And it really took my boyfriend’s response for me to realize, “Oh yes, that’s like not a normal thing to ask.”

MENENDEZ: Right. What is the fact that you get asked that so frequently, tell you about the way that we understand disability here in the United States?

O’CONNELL: It shows that I don’t think we do understand that at all. I think that there’s a lot of ignorance around disability. And I think partially it’s because there’s no dialogue around it. I think people oscillate between two, kind of like, positions, I think. You have the people that treat with kid gloves and kind of infantilize you and are really nervous around you. And then you have the real like blunt people were just like, “What’s — why are you walking like that?” And to me, both are kind of disturbia.

MENENDEZ: There was a great Twitter thread, I’m sure you saw about how strange able-bodied people can be around disabled people like a lot of stories of little people being asked who their parents are, people constantly being asked if they need help. Is that something that you deal with in the show?

O’CONNELL: Yes, absolutely. Yes, I think being disabled is a weird kind of like — it’s strange because your body is being highlighted. And it’s almost like public property. But you’re also seeing yourself, like, get ignored in real life. Like, I see people look at me highlight me and then make the decision to erase me in real time. So it’s this weird? Like –

MENENDEZ: What do you mean? What does it look like?

O’CONNELL: It’s like, it’s like — people will stare at me like I’m very visible. And then people will get uncomfortable, and then they’ll look the other way. And then I’ll just see myself kind of fall through the cracks. You know, it really is a weird juxtaposition of being hyper visible, but then being completely deleted.

MENENDEZ: I want to take a look at another clip.

O’CONNELL: Yes, totally.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

O’CONNELL: The kid screamed at me. Usually, when people see people that have CP, they’re just like, “gross” and then they go.

BRANDON POTTER, ACTOR, “SPECIAL”: People don’t really understand your disability. It looks different on everybody. Simon says straighten.

O’CONNELL: Uh, that ass is everything to me.

POTTER: Hey, hey, focus, yes. Save that for Grindr.

O’CONNELL: I love that you think I have enough self-esteem to be on Grind. What would my profile even say? I’m gay and disabled but I promise not to drill on you until the third date.

POTTER: There are plenty of drool fetishes out there, like your foot.

O’CONNELL: I’m so f***n jealous of Bob.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MENENDEZ: You’re so jealous of Bob, why?

O’CONNELL: My character feels like, in a way, Bob has the easier life because there’s no — he is who he is and he is defined by his disability and there’s no confusion about that. Whereas my character feels like he straddles both worlds and therefore belongs to me neither one.

MENENDEZ: Right. And you understand the complexity in saying that someone with a more severe disability, has it easier?

O’CONNELL: Oh, yes, it’s screwed up. My character has a lot to learn, honey. It’s like episode one. I mean, he has internalized ableism up the wazoo, and like, he’s very, very privileged, but he just feels very resentful and very uncomfortable as his own skin. So it’s a very, like, snap judgment thing of like, “Oh, Bob has it easier,” because his life has already kind of decided for him. Whereas, I kind of feel like I don’t belong anywhere.

MENENDEZ: Slow that down for me — internalized ableism. What does that mean?

O’CONNELL: Oh, internalized ableism is basically like, we grow up in a society that is ableist we’re like — it’s designed for able-bodied people. And basically, it’s like, we’re taught to hate ourselves, because society hates us. It’s sort of like internalized homophobia, internalized misogyny, when any kind of marginalized community feels prejudice — like, discrimination from the society, they take that inward, and then they are prejudiced against themselves.

MENENDEZ: I feel like that is a language that has only developed more recently. Well, this has been shared more recently because of the prevalence of social media. I mean, did you understand that ableism growing up?

O’CONNELL: No, I had no idea. And I had really no idea about how internalized it is was either. I mean, I think that I was in such denial by my disability for so long. It took me a long time to really unpack, like, what it meant for me and the kind of psychic damage that it caused.

MENENDEZ: What do you mean that you were in denial?

O’CONNELL: Well, I mean, when I was 20, I was hit by a car, and it was pretty serious. It was really bad. And then when I moved to New York, people just assumed my limp was from my car accident, and I never correct them because in my eyes, being an accident victim was very relatable, like any one of us could get hit by a car. Hopefully, we won’t. I wouldn’t recommend, 0 out of 10, but it could happen to us.

And to me having cerebral palsy, people never really understood what it was because CP can really run the gamut. It looks different on everybody so, to me, it was just kind of an ultimate shortcut. But, really, what I was doing was denying a big part of who I was and kind of dripping with self-loathing so it caused a lot of problems. It was sort of like putting a Band-Aid over like a large, gaping wound.

MENENDEZ: And when did that change?

O’CONNELL: So, when I got a book deal with Simon & Schuster, I got a book deal to write about my life and I was still closeted about my disability. And I was like, “Well, I don’t know if I can really write about my life without talking about this big important part of it but I’ve been closeted about it for so long.” I knew, I think, on a deeper level that it was causing me a lot of problems.

MENENDEZ: You knew what? Anxiety? Depression?

O’CONNELL: Anxiety and depression. I was on drugs, like it just wasn’t chic. I was going through a really hard time, and I don’t think, even back then, I was conscious that it was tied into denying my disability. I think like sometimes when you’re young and you’re drinking that “I hate myself” juice, you have these like moments of clarity where you see kind of like a life raft and you just know to take it.

So, with that book deal with Simon & Schuster, I kind of knew instinctively that this was my chance to be open and honest about who I was. So, I literally went to my kickoff meeting with Simon & Schuster and I was like, “Hey, this book that you guys bought, I kind of want to go in a different direction and write about my cerebral palsy.”

MENENDEZ: Why? What was the book that they bought?

O’CONNELL: It was honestly a not-chic how to be a 20-something Urban Outfitters book. I mean, it was, back then — it’s kind of “L.O.L.” now because it’s so been done, but back in 2011, people were just talking about millennials and being in their 20s. It was so novel and exciting. So, I got a book deal talking about that, but they really liked, obviously, the direction of the cerebral palsy. I think it deepened the story, but it was really challenging for me because I was going to have to now write a book about something that I had just began to unpack myself. So, I don’t know. In a weird way, the book is kind of painful for me to even read because I was just beginning to understand what my disability meant.

MENENDEZ: You’ve experienced multiple coming outs. In which order did they happen?

O’CONNELL: Okay. So, I came out of the closet when I was 17, but that was the definition of NBD. I come from a very gay family and I just knew that wasn’t an issue.

MENENDEZ: I just have to slow it down for non-millennials. It was the definition of “no big deal.”

O’CONNELL: Yes. Oh my god, yes, honey.

MENENDEZ: Yes, I’m here for you.

O’CONNELL: Translator. Yes. Basically, I come from a very gay family. I knew they looked at me and the reason why I came out was I liked this boy at my school and I knew that I had to come out in order to date him so I basically came out in a very efficient — I’m a Virgo. I came out and like a very Virgo, efficient manner, which was just like a crossed-out list. I was like, “Come out to this person and come out to this person.” I was coming out to 10 people a day. By the end of two weeks or three weeks, I had come out to everyone I knew.

MENENDEZ: What does it mean when you say you have a very gay family?

O’CONNELL: Oh, my God. Okay. My uncle’s gay, my grandfather died of AIDS — not to bring the room down — and my sister — well, I don’t know if she’d identify this anymore, but she was a liberal arts girl so she definitely was bi for a little bit. She might still be bi. Who knows? But she’s fluid, so I kind of just grew up around gayness.

MENENDEZ: So, in some ways, you came out about your disability later?

O’CONNELL: Yes, which, to me, revolutionized my life. So, I wrote the book, but even when I wrote the book, I didn’t tell anyone what I was writing about. I was like, very, very hush-hush about it. And then, when I when the book was going to come out in a couple months, I wrote a post for this blog called Thought Catalog called “Coming Out of the Disabled Closet” and it was insane. It really felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. My life truly changed overnight.

MENENDEZ: How so?

O’CONNELL: It was just so freeing to release that shame. You know what’s so painful about it? And I don’t live by regrets or anything like that, but the truth is, is that no one cared. No one truly cared. I mean, yes, you have ignorant people. Yes, you have people not understanding your ability. But I made something small into this huge monster that was controlling my life when I could have just treated it like a speck of dust. And so I just spent a lot of my 20s in a deep amount of pain, and it just didn’t have to be that way. Now, seriously, hashtag no regrets, it got me to where I am, but it is a bummer to know that I wasted so much time not liking myself.

MENENDEZ: One of the interesting things to me about both the way your book is framed and the way this show is framed is that we are both part of a generation. Part of the big stereotype around this generation is that we’ve all been raised to believe that we are special. One of the things I love in the book is you’re like, “But I…” There are a lot of contexts around your life that do make it less than ordinary.

O’CONNELL: Yes, I think, growing up, you have the helicopter parents stereotype, but mine was like doubly that because they actually truly needed to helicopter me especially in the beginning where everything was sort of up in the air in terms of my development, and I had tons of surgeries and getting fitted for leg braces and physical therapy. I mean, it was it was a full-time job just keeping me afloat. So, yes, I had a mom and dad that were really on me constantly, but they kind of had to be. But now, I’m in this position where I’m 32 years old and I have a hard time figuring out where my CP ends and my learned helplessness begins.

MENENDEZ: What does that mean?

O’CONNELL: I mean, it’s like, for example, I don’t have curtains on the first floor of my apartment because something about getting curtains is so challenging to me. I don’t even know where I would get them. It just darks me out so much that I can’t figure out how to hang them, like what would I even do? Are there curtain stores? There’s just so much I don’t know. It’s truly not chic and embarrassing. And part of me is like, is that my brain damage or being able to problem solve? Because that really is hard for me sometimes. Or is it because I’m so used to having everything done for me?

I mean, I think my mom just didn’t want to see me in any discomfort growing up, understandably so, so whenever I had a hard time figuring things out, I think I milked my disability and was like, “I don’t know how,” limping away, and she do it for me. So, it is hard for me to kind of figure out what is attributed to my disability or what is just attributed to the fact that I was coddled growing up.

MENENDEZ: Growing up, what was the closest thing you saw to an image of yourself reflected back to you in the media?

O’CONNELL: I mean, literally nothing. I mean, I remember watching “Will and Grace” and seeing Jack and Will, and being like, “Oh, that that’s sort a version of me.” And there was “Queer as Folk” but that was really hyper sexualized and that was, hopefully, not going to be my journey, just like screwing like rabbits after a nightclub. There really, really wasn’t anything. And then I would see disabled people at physical therapy, but I never really talked to them. I never felt like — I felt shy. I don’t know. There was just nothing. There was really nothing. And I think that really, really screwed me up because when I didn’t see myself being reflected back at me, it kind of confirmed my worst fears, which was that I didn’t matter, that I was a freak, that I didn’t fit in so it was it was basically everything I had felt about myself confirmed.

MENENDEZ: What does it mean? What message does it send if you don’t see people like yourself desiring or being desired?

O’CONNELL: It means that you’re not worthy of having sex. I was celibate for 10 years, not to brag, but, seriously, a full decade, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. And I think it’s because disability has — there’s so much left to be explored, especially our sexual agency, and the fact that we are horny, and that we do have our own wants and desires, and that they’re very real and very valid. So, that was never discussed, either. So, I feel like the messages I got from the media or the messages I didn’t get were just basically saying that I was like Grendel, and I just was not meant to have a partner and I was going to be alone.

MENENDEZ: What does it take to undo that?

O’CONNELL: Therapy. Your own Netflix show. A book.

MENENDEZ: A little help?

O’CONNELL: No. I mean, I think it was so interesting, because when I came out about having CP when I was 28, I just had confidence and I actually started dating boys again, and people were attracted to me in this new way. I think that for me, personally, I think I was projecting a lot of stuff onto people, like I assumed that they thought I was undateable and unlovable. And that’s kind of the reason why I wasn’t getting any dates, because when I started carrying myself better, I wouldn’t say the boys came running, but they definitely peeped their head and said, “Hello.”

MENENDEZ: There are two strong female characters in the show that I find very interesting: the best friend, Kim, who is very body-positive but who has her own struggles with financial stability and then the mom who I felt was one of the most honestly-written mothers I’ve seen in a very long time because what you came to realize very quickly is that her life has also been shaped in great measure by having a child with a disability.

O’CONNELL: Oh, yes. I mean, she’s someone who’s never thought about her own needs or put herself first, and that was really interesting for me, because that’s my own mom. Writing this part for my mom was sort of like wish fulfillment because I still don’t think that my mom has really done anything for herself. I think she always operates from a place of selflessness, which is great for everyone around her, but what about her? I also think that sometimes, this character of Karen — it’s almost like she had this special needs child, she threw all her attention to it, and I think that’s, in a way, almost convenient. When your hood is smoking and you need to pay attention to it and it’s on fire, it’s much easier to like funnel all your energy into someone else rather than examine your own things. Do you know what I mean? And I think for the character of Karen, there’s a lot that she hasn’t dealt with or thought about because she’s been too busy focusing on Ryan but, in a weird way, that’s the way she likes it. It’s easier for her to just focus on him than herself.

MENENDEZ: One of my favorite expressions about writing is that there’s universality and specifics because this, at the end of the day, is a story about an underdog.

O’CONNELL: Yes. Absolutely. I’m really glad that you — I say that — when we first went out with “The Pitch” in 2015, literally, I said this in “The Pitch.” I said, “I know that a character who’s gay and disabled feels kind of strange and niche, but what I want you to do with this show is I want you to watch it with your boyfriend or girlfriend sitting in bed and be like, ‘Babe, call Cedars-Sinai because I think I’m gay and have cerebral palsy, like, oh my god, 911,'” because the things that Ryan wants which is just like a boyfriend, a healthy relationship with his mom, to be valued at work, a friend, those are things that everybody wants.

And that’s not being special; that’s what makes us human. I don’t want people to see gay, disabled people as something foreign because that’s just sympathy. Where empathy comes is realizing that gay disabled people are just like you and that when you really, boil people down to their basicness, it’s just we all have the same wants and desires.

MENENDEZ: Ryan, thank you so much.

O’CONNELL: Yes. Thank you for having me.