Lessons Learned from Five Years of Embracing My Disabilities and Neurodivergence

Listen - Lessons Learned from Five Years

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I didn’t grow up with the language of disability. I grew up with survival. Like many children of immigrants, I learned early to keep my head down, push through pain, and never ask for help. Disability was something whispered about, pitied, or avoided, not something you claimed, embodied, or explored. It wasn’t until my late 20s, after receiving an autism and ADHD diagnosis, that I began to understand the world I had been navigating my entire life: a world that was never designed for people like me.

Since then, disability has become one of my greatest teachers.

One of the first things I learned is that disability is not just an identity, it’s a community, a culture, and a shared language of resilience and truth-telling. The disability community isn’t monolithic; it’s vibrant, intersectional, and full of brilliance shaped by lived experience. I’ve met people whose disabilities are visible and invisible, acquired and congenital, celebrated and stigmatized. What connects us isn’t diagnosis, it's the reality that we’ve had to learn how to exist in systems that routinely deny us access, dignity, or understanding.

Navigating disability spaces taught me that we are not the problem. The world is. So many of the challenges we face are not about our bodies or brains; they’re about the environments, expectations, and systems around us. When something is inaccessible, people often assume the individual must adjust. But disability justice taught me a fundamental truth: inaccessibility is a design problem, not a personal failure.

Another observation: in disability spaces, storytelling is more than expression; it’s survival. I’ve learned that every disabled person carries a story that reveals a gap, a barrier, or a moment the world wasn’t built with them in mind. By sharing these stories, we honor our lived wisdom and find connection in the places we once felt isolated. Storytelling has become the bridge between who I was taught to be and who I can finally allow myself to become.

But one of the most profound lessons has been about interdependence. Disability spaces showed me that independence, something I was taught to aspire to, is overrated. What truly sustains us is community care, mutual aid, and relationships built on trust. I’ve witnessed disabled people show up for one another in ways that challenge the individualistic culture so many of us were raised in. We build access together, not perfectly, not all at once, but intentionally.

I’ve also learned that healing is not linear. For many disabled people, healing isn’t about “fixing” ourselves; it’s about unlearning shame, honoring our needs, and finding environments where we can exist without apology. I’m still navigating what this means for me, but disability community has taught me that healing happens in the presence of people who truly see you.

Today, I move through disability spaces with more clarity, pride, and purpose. I continue to learn from those who came before me, leaders, storytellers, culture-shifters, and from those walking this path alongside me.

Disability is not a detour from the life I was meant to live. It has become the lens that helps me understand the world more honestly, love myself more fully, and create a future where everyone of us belong.