Carson Tueller on Ableism and the Social Model

There is a sound in this story that matters more than any metaphor: a small, soft "tss," like a pop, at the back of a skull. That is what disability coach and activist Carson Tueller heard when he overshot a foam pit at a trampoline park outside Salt Lake City and hit the ground headfirst (18:24). He was 23. He did not feel much pain, just a tweak. Then his body went silent, like a plug pulled from a wall. He called out to his father, who climbed into the pit and said only, "My boy. My boy." Lying there, Tueller had one clear thought: "I have people who love me. I have people I love, and that's all I need" (20:15). Peace arrived, and stayed, for a long time.

It did not stay forever. For years afterward he called that day his death day. Then, on June 16, 2018, his younger sister Kate, then 13, said something over pretzel bites at a strip mall that rearranged the whole story: "What if we call that the day of your rebirth?" (21:47). He argued with her in the car. By the time he got home, three hours later, he had landed on something closer to fact than feeling: the only thing that actually happened was that the bones in his neck moved and hit his spinal cord (22:35). Everything else, the drama, the tragedy, the sense of being broken, he had added. "I have added all the rest," he says. That line is the hinge of the whole conversation: the body does a thing, and a mind, trained by a culture, decides what that thing means.

Tueller had practiced this kind of separation before, in a much earlier chapter. He grew up a devout, queer Mormon, the kind of believer who memorized Galatians 5 and expected its "fruits of the spirit," peace and patience, to show up if he obeyed the rules (14:07). He tried, for a while, to be gay without being gay, a distinction he describes with some embarrassment now. What finally broke the spell was noticing that joy arrived, not when he suppressed himself, but when he stopped. That taught him to listen for a voice distinct from the one handing out verdicts about his worth. He names that voice the capital S self.

"I know that the capital S self, my self, will never tell me that I'm broken. That is always a message from something outside of me." — Carson Tueller [00:52]

That sentence is doing real work. It is not a mood. It is a method: when a thought arrives that says something is wrong with a body, the move is not to argue with the thought but to ask where it came from, because, Tueller insists, it never comes from the self.

Where Disability Actually Lives

This is where the episode turns from memoir into argument, and the argument has a name: ableism, the belief that some bodies are the real, good, default ones and that disability is a broken version of that default (26:34). Tueller distinguishes two ways of thinking about it. The medical model says disability lives inside a person's body, something to be fixed. The social model says disability exists only in relation to an environment built without that body in mind (45:30). A wheelchair user is not disabled by stairs in the abstract; a building with no ramp disables them.

He has a blunt illustration. He lived in New York City for two years and found himself, he says, ten times more disabled there than in Utah (45:07), not because his spinal cord changed but because the city's infrastructure did not accommodate him: the subway system is only 20 percent accessible (43:11), and he and his boyfriend would be turned away from restaurant after restaurant for lack of room, sometimes still searching at midnight. He read Glennon Doyle's book Untamed while living there and landed on the verdict that stuck: "New York has not earned disabled people" (43:11). The phrase reverses the usual blame. The failure is not his body's; it is the city's design choices.

That reversal matters because of what it does to suffering. Tueller is careful to say that some pain is physical and real, chronic nerve pain, for instance, that does not disappear with better architecture. But he separates that from a second, larger category: the suffering that comes from feeling unworthy, unlovable, or broken, which he says is socially constructed, not a necessary consequence of paralysis (41:44).

"I can survive being paralyzed. I can't survive feeling unlovable." — Carson Tueller [40:25]

That second kind of suffering has a public face: inspiration porn, a term coined by the late Australian disability activist Stella Young. Tueller defines it as disabled people's bodies, stories, or ordinary activities being used by non-disabled people to feel inspired, or sometimes to feel pity, or to measure their own complaints against someone else's supposedly harder life (47:30). It looks like a compliment. It functions as a diagnosis, assigning tragedy to a life the speaker has not actually asked about. Tueller calls this "the miscategorization of disabled suffering" (48:53): when something is genuinely hard, like finding no gym equipment built for his body, people attribute the hardship to his body rather than to the ableist design around it.

Sex Without a Script

The same logic, strip away the inherited story and ask what is actually true, shows up again in how Tueller talks about sex. He had never had sex before his injury and had never watched pornography, a product of a devoutly observant upbringing. That left him, after paralysis, with no script at all for what his body could or should do (31:10). So he experimented slowly, with trusted partners, starting with kissing and touch and long stretches of what he calls foreplay, paying attention to what actually produced pleasure rather than performing what sex was supposed to look like. The result, he says, was orgasms that were more intense and repeatable than anything he experienced before his injury, and partners who told him it was the best sex they had ever had (34:14). His explanation is simple: no rules, no performance, no assumed roles, just constant, specific communication about what felt good (34:32). He calls it approaching sex with a beginner's mind, and argues that non-disabled people could have dramatically better sex if they adopted the same posture, dropping the comfortable mask of a scripted role in favor of saying, plainly, what they want.

That same unfinished, honest quality shows up when he talks about masculinity. He admits to a lingering, internalized belief that a man's worth is tied to physical capability, to what a body can do or protect (54:33). He traces it to a specific night, sitting in his mother's van in a dark parking lot, realizing that if something happened to her while she walked to the store, he could not get up to help (54:07). He does not resolve this tension so much as name it, which is consistent with everything else in the conversation: the goal is not arriving at a fixed, finished self-acceptance, but noticing the inherited story in real time and choosing not to obey it.

That is also his closing advice, offered not as a guru's secret but as an ongoing practice. Listen for the voice that is the self, distinct from the socialized shame layered on top of it, through therapy, coaching, or writing, and then try to live consistently with what it says (57:31). He is not claiming he has stopped visiting what he calls the haunted house, the recurring return to grief, anger, and old doubts about his body. He says he still goes there, sometimes for weeks at a stretch (05:56). The freedom he describes is smaller and more durable than permanent peace: knowing, once inside the haunted house, how to find the door back out.