Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

by Alice Wong

Storytelling itself is an activity, not an object. Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience….Like all stories, they are most fundamentally a chance to ride around inside another head and be reminded that being who we are and where we are, and doing what we’re doing, is not the only possibility. —Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2006)

What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow.

It’s important to have people believe in you and to expect that you’re going to succeed. People need to have

high expectations for people with disabilities because then they’ll give them opportunities to learn and grow.

When we were in the institution, we didn’t have a voice. We were thought to be incompetent, so no one took the time to teach us things. But people can accomplish great things with support. Having an intellectual disability doesn’t limit what you can contribute. Being put in institutions limits what people can do and guarantees that people will be dependent for the rest of their lives. Anyone can become disabled at any time. We are people just like everyone else. The time needs to be over for people to be sent to institutions because there aren’t options in the community or because people think it’s cheaper or more protected. It wastes people’s lives and, in the long run, keeps them from contributing. There’s no such thing as a good institution.

Segregating people is always bad; people never grow in those places and are safer and happier in the community. I’m one of many people who could be here today. People sometimes say that I’m not like some of the other people with intellectual disabilities. The only thing that’s special about me is that people believed in me and in my potential to learn in spite of my disability, and they took the time to help me learn. Please protect people from places where no one expects anything from them and where they’re just kept alive. We can’t go back. It’s time to move forward.