No Surrender with Hollis Peirce

No Surrender with Hollis Peirce

From This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life by Erica J. Schmidt

May 22, 2025 · Episode 41

About this episode

Hollis Peirce shares his uplifting perspective on living with muscular dystrophy and challenges societal views on disability.

Today’s guest is the bright light, podcast host, historian, athlete, and disability advocate, Hollis Peirce. With Hollis, disability is neither a tragedy nor a motivational speech. He offers a refreshing, real, and uplifting take on living with muscular dystrophy. Early on, a doctor told Hollis’s mother that her child would suffer from an “inability to thrive.” Instead, he developed what the experts might call, a lifelong case of thriving. In our all-dressed conversation, Hollis talks about everything—why it’s a waste of energy to get too hung up on language, what it’s like to lose your best friends to a less forgiving version of your condition (long live Dino and the No Surrenders), how he confronted his own ableism when faced with the choice between six months of palliative car or a ventilator to help him breathe. (“I picked the vent! Otherwise, my sister would have killed me!) My favourite part was our impromptu discussion on mortality, complete with dark humour and a sense of wonder. We also totally nailed the listener question: I Can’t Accept My Disability and I Feel Like Nobody Around Me Understands. Don’t worry, we banish the phrase, “look on the bright side.” And yet, as…

People in this episode

Host: Erica J. Schmidt

Guest: Hollis Peirce

Topics covered

  • disability advocacy
  • muscular dystrophy
  • ableism
  • mortality
  • thriving

Keywords

  • disability
  • advocacy
  • thriving
  • ableism
  • mortality
  • podcast

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Twenty-First Century Disability

More episodes of This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life podcast page.