In conversation with the next generation

I spoke at a highschool's human library event last week

Last Friday, I gave the same talk four different times.

I was at a Human Library event as one of the “books” that students could “check out” to hear our story and about our lived experience.

It was actually really sweet watching the highschool students that had organized it all see their own event come to fruition. You could tell how proud they were of it. And how grateful they were that all the speakers had shown up.

I titled my talk “The Path to Disabled Joy” and talked about what had happened to me — what led me to become disabled — and how I have cultivated disabled joy since then.

With each of the four groups, I looked closely at the students, before the talk, while I was speaking, and during the question period as they carefully picked out their questions.

They were nervous. Not unkind — nervous. Afraid of getting it wrong.

I have to admit I was also nervous. Teenagers are a complete unknown for me, and I had little insight into how they might interact with the concept of disability, let alone disabled joy.

Here’s what surprised me.

They didn’t really want to dig more into what happened to me, or what it physically means to have a spinal cord injury. That was what I had braced for.

What they asked instead: what’s your view on life like now, compared to before? What’s hard on an ordinary Tuesday? What could people actually do better? What could I do better?

Better questions than most adults ask, if I’m honest. And that made it really easy to give them generous answers.

The first thing I told them: you don’t have to arrive knowing. You just have to arrive curious.

I shared about my concept of humble curiosity. Don’t make up your mind about who I am before you’ve asked. Don’t assume my needs based on what you think you know about my disability.

Stay curious, without being invasive in your curiosity. Ask for how you can support in making a disabled person’s experience more comfortable or how you can empower them to participate they way they want to.

The second thing is smaller, more practical, and it’s the one I wish more people understood.

So much of disability is admin.

So before you suggest a restaurant to a friend, for example, do some of that admin yourself. Is there a step at the door? A bathroom I can actually use? And then, tell me you’ve done that research so I don’t have to.

You’ve just taken something off my plate that I carry every single time.

Mia Mingus calls this access intimacy — that hard-to-name feeling when someone gets your access needs without you having to spell them out again. When access isn’t a favour you have to ask for.

It doesn’t have to be grand. Sometimes it’s just the simple act of thinking about me before I had to ask for it.

The third thing was the one I think they most wanted help with. Because they all knew it can happen.

They asked me how they can help interrupt an intrusive conversation. (We’ve all had the “What happened to you?” from a stranger, haven’t we?)

So I gave them options:

• You can move the conversation along — change the subject, hand me an exit.

• You can interrupt and talk to me directly.

• You can say something to them, gently, in the moment, or quietly, afterwards.

You don’t have to fix it. You just have to not leave me holding it on my own.

Getting to say all of this out loud, four times, to small groups of kids, felt like a bit of a gift.

I spend a lot of my life explaining myself and my community. This felt different.

This was about handing something over to young kids who were (mostly) listening.

These kids who told me they were afraid of getting it wrong, which also told me that they care about getting it right.

I just reminded them that it’s ok to get something wrong. As long as you’re coming at it with the right intentions, and you don’t make assumptions, and you don’t make your curiosity intrusive, people are going to welcome a conversation with you.

I think that somewhere along the line, most adults learn to look away. These young ones hadn’t learned that yet. They were still nervous in the right direction.

If even a few of them hold onto it, the disabled people who come after me might get to spend a little less of their lives explaining themselves. Or hiding themselves. Or taking on the burden of protecting their friends from what they deal with day to day.

I won’t pretend a handful of teenagers fixes everything. They’re all focused on graduating right now, and that’s huge. And plus, it shouldn’t all rest on them.

But there’s something pretty cool about engaging with a generation of kids that might just be looking at it all differently.