Last weekend, I visited a Sunday School class at my church to talk about disabilities. I gave my usual explanation of my prosthetic arm and read Jacob’s Eye Patch, which has become one of my go to picture books on the subject of differences. I love that way it makes it clear that questions and curiosity are okay. Instead, it puts the focus on how and when you ask questions or express curiosity about people’s differences. The kids seemed to get that. They all agreed that there are times when they don’t want to talk about themselves or be in the spotlight, especially about something different.
Then I asked the kids if they had any questions for me about my prosthetic arm or about how I did something. “Anything,” I said. “This is a safe space where I encourage questions.” Hands went up slowly, shyly. Still more kids asked their questions quietly when other things were happening in the class. For some people, curiosity doesn’t care for the spotlight any more than differences do.
As I left, I said, “If you think of a question later, I’m around on Sunday mornings. You can always ask me.” It’s true. I am a walking safe space. I wasn’t always this way, and in all honesty, I don’t always feel up to it even now. There have been several times, usually on a bus ride home after a long day of work, that I’ll purposely avoid potential questions that I don’t feel up to answering right then. That, of course, is why Jacob’s Eye Patch hits so close to home for me despite my having no personal connection to eye patches (other than the obvious pirate connections that plague both Jacob and me).
The truth is that when I was a kid I didn’t want to be the person who always had to answer questions, explain myself, or have patience with rude comments. I was more likely to tell some sarcastic story about a car accident or animal attack than answer any real questions. I’m not proud of that, but I think that it’s probably true for a lot of people with disabilities. Even for those of us who have been born with our differences, it can take a while to get comfortable with the reality of our story. I’m not sure exactly when the shift to purposely creating a safe space for curiosity happened for me, but I think part of it started, or at least started growing, in sixth grade when my reading teacher took me aside to invite me to share my perspective of life with a disability to the class as we began a unit on challenges. At the time, I declined the opportunity to speak up. I didn’t like the idea of drawing attention to myself as different at that age, and I didn’t have anything important to say on the subject of “challenges.” Or so I thought.
To start off the unit, my teacher booktalked related titles from our school library. I don’t remember any specific book titles from that booktalk, but I do remember that they all seemed to have the same theme: life with any kind of disability is really hard. I remember feeling irritated by this, but I still didn’t think I had anything important to say on the subject.
When the class discussion started rolling, I sat quietly, listening as my fellow students spoke of the characters in the books we were reading for the unit. I thought: Is that how they think of me? Did they pity me like that? Was I as “inspirational” to them as the characters in those books? Was that okay with me?
Eventually I did raise my hand to speak. I don’t remember what I said. What stands out to me all these years later isn’t so much that I said the perfect things. It’s that I was given space to speak and that I was allowed to stay silent, to listen, until I had something to say. I felt valued but also respected and that was so important to my feeling safe enough in that class to speak up.
To be honest, I haven’t really stopped speaking since then. Now that I know the power of sharing my perspective, I have made it an integral part of my personal and professional life. Last summer, I was invited to be part of a book discussion group at a local public library as they read One-Handed Catch by MJ Auch. In the group of middle schoolers, I shared how my experience as a congenital amputee compared to Norm’s experience with an acquired amputation in the book. If the kids took away nothing else from what I had to say, I hope they realized that there is no single disability experience. There’s not even a single experience of being one-handed!
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her TED Talk, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
I’m still grateful to that sixth grade teacher who invited me to share my story and let me speak my truth even when it differed from the narratives presented in the class reading material. She fostered in me an appreciation of safe spaces and open discussion and that has shaped so much of my life now, both professionally and personally.
So, thanks Mrs. MacDonald from Lewis-Palmer Middle School in Monument, Colorado. I hope you know that you had a positive impact on at least one of your students.
I wish I had a cool story like the girl in 
Proper Noun Blog 