By: Carolanne Link
Awareness Day. Awareness Week. Awareness Month. There’s so many going on, we can’t even keep track. Usually, we ignore ones that don’t directly apply to us. We feel like we’re too busy to learn about something outside of our realm and a lot of awareness campaigns come with awkward conversations and requests for donations. Overall, awareness campaigns tend to get ignored. However, I want to tell you how UCLA Disability Awareness Week while I was a student changed my world.
A little background on me, I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was about 18 months old because I did not start walking or even using my legs properly as an infant. I would scoot around on my butt, using my arms to propel me while my legs would be dead weight. The doctors told my parents I may never walk. While I was slow to walk, I eventually did, and with some pretty extensive physical therapy, I became ambulatory with a high level of independence. I never had a disabled community around me growing up and never realized what I was missing. I didn’t conceptualize my disability until I was about 14 years old when certain mobility tasks became more difficult for me. Even then, I didn’t think much of it until I started university here at UCLA. My very first week I realized that I wasn’t physically capable of walking from my dorm to my classes and began to rely on the CAE van to get to and from classes. About halfway through my time at UCLA, I began collapsing on campus just trying to get from one class to the next.
After a long, arduous and costly process, my family managed to get me a wheelchair of my own and I started my second to last year at UCLA in a wheelchair. I was very self-conscious. I didn’t know how this would affect my personal or academic life. I had no friends or acquaintances that used wheelchairs or identified as disabled as far as I knew. Especially since I retained some degree of ambulatory ability, I felt uncomfortable trying to figure out where I fit in.
Luckily for me, I learned about Disability Awareness Week which happened during Week 2 of that very same quarter when I got my wheelchair. I attended the UCLA Committee on Disability (UCOD) meeting and felt so relieved to meet a room full of people who cared about what struggles I was facing and wanted to better this campus for accessibility and awareness. At the time I felt so lost in my own identity as a disabled person, had no disabled community and was ignorant of many of the resources for disabled students. I felt so empowered by being surrounded by people who cared and meeting people who identified with all sorts of disabilities. It made me more comfortable in my own skin and more comfortable with my campus and community.
During that week I also got to try wheelchair basketball for the first time. Growing up disabled but mainstreamed I had always accepted that sports was just something I couldn’t do. I lived vicariously through my exceptionally athletic younger brother play sports: lacrosse, water polo, golf, martial arts, basketball, etc. I had tried to do individual activities like martial arts or swimming, but I was always separated from the class or activity so it could be adapted to me. Therefore, that day was so momentous to me. There I was, twenty years old and playing a team sport for the first time. I cannot adequately put into words the simultaneous feeling of exhilaration and contentment I felt during that experience. I could play sports! A revelation I hope no one else has to have that late in life. But, better late than never.
Being embraced into this community and knowing about the resources on this campus changed my view on myself, my school, and the possibilities that were open to me. While I deeply acknowledge there is so much work to be done to make our world truly accessible and ensure these resources can operate efficiently and effectively, I need to celebrate the victory of me finding them at all. Disability Awareness Week may largely go ignored and unappreciated. It may not change the world. But, it fundamentally changed mine. Now, I’m lucky enough to be UCLA staff working to ensure with each passing year and Disability Awareness Week that we improve and make that same impact on a disabled student that it had on me.
Originally Posted: 9 October 2019