Seeing the World through Ability-Colored Glasses
For just over a decade, I worked at the Kids Center for Pediatric Therapies, which is the place where Sophie got therapy for years as a kid. The center did amazing work but was a bit of a best-kept secret in town. I ran all the efforts to change that through marketing and fundraising. I…
For just over a decade, I worked at the Kids Center for Pediatric Therapies, which is the place where Sophie got therapy for years as a kid. The center did amazing work but was a bit of a best-kept secret in town. I ran all the efforts to change that through marketing and fundraising. I started alone, and then for most of that period had a partner in crime. One of the main things we did was a monthly tour to bring the community in to see our work. Quickly I learned that a challenge for us was not just for people to learn about our services, but to be able to see the potential in our kids.
That’s where I got the idea that today has beautifully ended up as a graphic on the cover of my new book. I was looking one day at the word DISABILITY – and even though of course I am not the first person to see this – for me it was like a Eureka moment when I realized if you just erased three letters, suddenly DISABLITY turned to ABILITY. Today I see this idea used a lot, such as shirts that read “Don’t DIS my ABILITY.” I love that. It’s sort of like those social media posts you see where people point out that IMPOSSIBLE could be interpreted as “I AM POSSIBLE” or “I’m possible.”
And more than just a play on words, this idea became a core tenant of my work there. Over the years, as I have interviewed people with disabilities, one of the top challenges they face is for people to see who they are beyond their disability. They do not want to be defined by what they cannot do. It is definitely part of who they are, but it is a small part of the total essence of who they are as a person, a brother, a daughter, a girlfriend, a spouse, a coworker, a boss. One young adult said that every time he rolled into a room, the first thing people noticed was his wheelchair. They immediately started to form opinions about him without even getting to know him.
For a short time, we did some outreach to classrooms. One of the exercises we did was to ask kids to write down two things they were not good at and put each on a sticky note. Then we brought a volunteer to the front of the class and placed the notes all over their body. We had another volunteer come up and read the notes off to the class. It was powerful because it made the kids realize that we all have obstacles. We all have insecurities. We all have short-comings. But most of us don’t wear those obstacles on a shirt so others know them, or worse yet define us by them. It was an eye-opener for the kids and prompted some great discussions.
I had an idea, that sadly I never implemented, to see if someone could create a set of glasses- sort of like inexpensive “readers” – that we would pass out to our guests as they sat down in our conference room to begin their visit. On the screen would be the word disability. They would be instructed to put on their glasses and suddenly when they looked at the screen the word would change to ABILITY. The idea was to think what if we saw every child and worked to uncover their abilities, instead of defining them by the fact that they can’t walk, are non-verbal, or even travel the world as a person who is blind?
That mindset formed the name of my book, and the podcast which grew out the years of research for the book. The imagery is what now sits on the cover of my first book around this topic. We’ve all heard the phrase “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.” I wonder how much better the world would be if all we saw was ability?