"Triumph"?

Following up on my post from yesterday, I find a passage from Ann Patchett's afterword to Lucy Grealy's memoir Autobiography of a Face (which I'm currently writing a paper about) rather fitting:

Once when we were in graduate school a film crew came from Ireland to do a documentary on her. "It's going to be about the triumph of the human spirit," the producer said. But Lucy couldn't pull herself together for the shoot. She couldn't stop laughing. The last thing she saw herself as, the last thing she wanted to be, was the poster girl for the human spirit. A week later we were sitting together in a lecture on Faulkner and I passed Lucy a slip of paper with the single word "triumph" written on it. She started laughing, and this time she simply could not stop. She became so hysterical that finally, red-faced with tears pouring down her cheeks, she had to excuse herself from class.
(Autobiography of a Face, p.229-230)

Substitute my deafness for Grealy's facial disfigurement, and insert my own dose of media coverage in recent weeks. Bingo. And yet Grealy herself felt compelled to write about her face, to explore its influence on how she experienced the world. She herself brought this kind of discourse to the forefront of her work and her legacy, however reluctant she might have otherwise felt about it. Likewise, I feel compelled to write and to speak out about deafness, about disability, and to explore its effects through words. How does that match up with my hesitation to showcase it in some of the more mainstream representations of me that have surfaced since the Rhodes, and that continue to arise? I'm not completely sure. I imagine Grealy herself might have felt the same way. As flattered as I want to feel, I also feel tempted to laugh hysterically.