My disability is a form of dyslexia. I didn’t learn about it actually until my sophomore or junior year in high school. And I think my mother always had an idea that I had something, but teachers and stuff never pointed it out or anything, and I did well in school up until about high school and I just started struggling ridiculously — especially with foreign languages.
I have lupus, which is a autoimmune disease — which means basically my immune system is overactive and instead of helping my body it kind of just attacks my body and just kind of makes you a lot weaker, I guess.
I have spastic diplegia cerebral palsy from birth, and … for the most part I didn’t really feel very disabled from that as I was growing up and it wasn’t till I mentioned earlier, until I hit college where I started having pretty severe back pain. And so that was a different story for me in the beginning of kind of a new way of thinking about my body and my abilities and how that would impact my future career.
In interactions with people, sometimes I talk out of turn, sometimes I say things that I probably shouldn’t say. I have a hard time with my internal filter.
I have several different chronic illnesses that constantly work together and when one starts acting up, then all the others do and often days I can’t leave my room or move out of my bed. I have to kind of plan around that. Sometimes I can get out of my room but it’s hard to walk, so I need to make sure I can get around campus easily. And other times, I’m hospitalized at times where I have to be out of school for a long period of time.
I have a learning disability. I have issues with written language and with math. Sometimes that feels like everything in school, but mainly it shows up in spelling. I can spell the same word 10 different ways in one paragraph, and with math because a lot of times when I sit down, it takes me longer to organize my thoughts and work through the process than it tends to take other students.
[Banner: “Challenges of My Disability”]
The biggest challenge I face is that I never know when I’m going to get sick, and at one time with my acute pancreatitis I wasn’t able to go to school for three months, and I couldn’t eat by mouth so I mostly stayed in the house every day. But the biggest challenge was just not knowing when I’m gonna be sick and if that happens in college, I’ll have to take off a semester or two semesters depending on the length because it can last from one week to three months. Another challenge is just feeling tired a lot and I want to be able to do as much as I can and participate in many activities and organizations, but because of the illness sometimes I’m not able to do that.
Due to my disability, I’m absent a lot from class. In high school I missed a lot of class, probably more than 50 days a year. In college it’s a little different because if you miss class it affects your grade … it affects it negatively. A lot of universities and a lot of departments have policies where you can only miss two or three days of class and then your grade drops automatically no matter what the excuse is. So you have to kind of plan around that, make sure that you’re in constant contact with your professors. Sometimes you feel like you’re being bothersome, but really it’s good to be overprepared rather than underprepared.
With the dyslexia I think, it made math difficult for me also and I’m not exactly sure why. I was never really able to figure that out because I thought it had mostly to do with letters and stuff. But I guess with remembering mathematical formulas, having the dyslexia with the shapes and the numbers and with math formulas you get ’em or you don’t. And I think in college that helped me to steer towards a major where I didn’t have to take much math, and I don’t think that was a bad thing because I ended up going towards a major that I really enjoy — something that’s hands-on and changes every day, and keeps me interested.
The challenges I face academically are … reading and writing in particular, not so much that I don’t know what to say and I can’t comprehend what’s being said, as much as putting it on paper and reading it from the paper. And it’s very frustrating … when you put things on paper and you’re too busy trying to figure out how to spell a certain word and then you end up losing the original thought.
[Banner: “Accepting My Disability”]
I must say, when I learned about my disability I was shocked, very surprised, because I just always felt, “I’m a good student, I’m normal,” and I had to get over that feeling of not being normal because just because I have a learning disability … it doesn’t mean I’m not the same person. And dealing with it — my mom, talking to her about how I felt and talking to my support counselor at school about adjusting to having a disability — it all helped me to understand that it doesn’t change who I am, it’s just a part of me and it’s something I have to accept like the fact that I wear glasses.
Music is what really, really helped me to accept and to express my feelings for my disability, and to kind of help me when I have a bad day or when I’m having a good day to help me through it.
In high school when I was officially tested and the doctor did come back and say, “Yes you do have a learning disability, these are the things you do well at; however these are your weaknesses,” it was definitely an internal struggle for me, just for the fact that I have always been such a strong outgoing person. I tend to excel in school, and for me it was odd to think that I would have a weakness that no matter how much I work at it, it’s always going to be there. And it’s the having to communicate to other people and to accept my own weaknesses, that took me several years actually to come to a point where I was comfortable actually using my accommodations and communicating not only to my peers, but to my professors that I was going to need some additional help.
[Banner: “Positive Aspects of My Disability”]
I also think that it’s taught me to think outside the box about how to get to my goals, that there isn’t just one way, one pathway to a particular goal, that there are many ways.
I get to register early for classes and that’s great. I do get time and a half on a test, and there’s sometimes I don’t use the time and a half. There’s sometimes that time and a half gives me extra time to write more thoughts down and to give my teacher a longer essay to read. It has taught me to be a lot more accepting about individuals around me, and because my disability’s a hidden disability … it has taught me that you can’t assume someone else can do something just because it looks like they can; that a lot of times you can’t tell what people can and cannot do without talking to them. And outside of school I actually got my internship, which will become a full-time job in a few months, through the WRP program, which places individuals with disabilities with the federal government, and that has really helped me. It’s given me a lot of options that regular college students don’t tend to get. I have two years work experience going into graduating, which is a huge deal.