Author: Cierra Mangal

By Stevie Mays

My depression is inherently entangled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Poor executive functioning makes completing tasks, especially self-care tasks, feel impossible. My life since college and post-grad, or as many millennials say, “adulting,” is arduous. My career is the classic COVID gig life—I work four different jobs ranging in hours of commitment and commute. I presumed this would have freed up my schedule to take more time committed to becoming organized, and man was that a misread on my part. I feel as though my body’s executive functioning can handle work, and I keep up my social life decently, but self-care is where I run out of spoons, a common analogy within the disability community.

My first depressive episode was in 8th grade. I attended private Catholic schools K-8th grade, and I loved the smaller class size experience and found the teachers had a personal investment in my success as a learning-disabled student and mutually entered the classroom with curiosity. In Michigan, there is a Catholic school entrance exam to attend. I received my typical accommodations and passed with flying colors. I toured my high school of choice with my cousin, who also attended the school. She felt cool, and I hoped to be as well. When I brought my test scores to a meeting with a school counselor, I recall tension on the car ride over with my parents.

I entered the meeting and discussed my extracurriculars and excitement about my acceptance to a travel softball team and my love of choir and science. I saw her pull out a yellow folder and open it. She looked at me and said, “so you have dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyspraxia.” I was speechless. My heart started pounding, even still 13 years later. My face turned beet red and hot. I looked at her and mumbled, “yes,” and she gave a painful smile.

My brain had a flood of thoughts. “What is all that?” “What is wrong with me?” I recall trying to recite exactly what she said in my head, so I could try to google it later. I later learned that dyslexia makes it very challenging to spell words I haven’t heard before. As my parent entered the room, the counselor said to my parents, “I am sorry, but we do not accept students with disabilities. Did you read our website?” My parents were stunned. My memory cuts off after this moment, and I forget exactly what words were exchanged.

Afterward, I attended public high school, where accommodations were later taken away in 10th grade. I can and will never forget how I felt leaving that meeting at the private school—a heaviness filled my body along with rejection, shame, helplessness, and loss of community. My family and community were Catholic at the time, and everyone I knew was attending a catholic high school, and I was an outsider. I felt stupid knowing my disability caused this. Students were being pushed out of private catholic schools, so students were likely not open about their learning disabilities. I felt isolated and alone. Later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) from this meeting. I had daily intrusive thoughts about being dyslexic. Those thoughts scrolled through my brain nearly constantly for three years.

During my first two years in high school, I had barely above a 2.0 GPA, and I wouldn’t say I liked school. I hated being there, I hated having to complete my work, and I wanted to disengage completely. My mom recognized this as depression. I felt so low for so long that I assumed it was my new state of being.

Awareness of educational trauma and mental health is critical to prevent other students from suffering from deep depression. My brain will always have memories from that traumatic day, and I want educators and parents to understand ways to mitigate this experience from happening to other students.

I believe that success, enjoying learning, and fulfilling life are attainable for all LD people. It starts with acceptance and pride, which is critical from my perspective to thrive with an LD. We must celebrate our strengths, encourage our interests, and be gentle with ourselves —don’t add pressure on the more difficult tasks.

If you’re a student with LD or connect to someone with one, help us practice and work at things, and don’t add unnecessary stress or pressure. Do your best, and don’t worry about making all A’s— a few B’s, C’s, or even lower is acceptable occasionally. Sometimes it isn’t easy to meet the standard that year, and that’s okay; maybe in a few years, it will all click. Your grades and career do not determine one’s worth or value, and you are way more than your performance on an exam or job title.

By Eliza Young

Disability is a broad term that may seem hard to define. Obviously, there are medical definitions and legal definitions, but what matters to me is how my disabled community defines disability. Who can be included in the disabled community? What unites all disabled people? The answer, like most communities, is a set of shared experiences. Disabled people, for all our differences, all have experiences navigating a world constructed for people that are not like us. Disability is just a difference. It is the way someone’s brain or body works, a difference, that leads them to have a unique experience much differently than someone who doesn’t have that disability.

Not everyone with a disability identifies as disabled, which is ok. But I wanted to share here what led me to realize I am disabled and why it is okay – and even empowering – to identify as disabled.
One of the things I remember most vividly about elementary school is struggling to learn to read. While most people don’t remember learning to read, it was a daily struggle I faced for years. I recall the moment I realized I was different. I was in first grade; the class was working on a worksheet about words and letters that I couldn’t pay attention to. Every couple of minutes, I would get up to ask my teacher, “how long until lunch.” She became increasingly annoyed with my interruptions and finally snapped at me to “learn to read the clock.” I slunk back to my seat and noticed that I was the only kid not working diligently on my worksheet. I wondered how they were all able to pay attention and felt confused and alienated by this thing that everyone else seemed to be able to do effortlessly, that I couldn’t seem to do, no matter how hard I tried.

That memory sticks with me because it is the first instance of a feeling that I would come to know well, the frustration of trying as hard as you possibly can and still failing. It was only later that I learned that my eyes couldn’t focus on a close object for more than 9 seconds at a time. In other words, every 9 seconds, the page would split into two images, and my eyes struggled to bring them back into focus. This condition, called convergence insufficiency, is why I had so much trouble concentrating and reading. A couple of months after I first realized that there was something different about me compared to my classmates, I was formally diagnosed by a doctor. My parents and the doctor explained that the way I was experiencing the world was not the way everyone else experiences it, a pretty profound concept for a 6-year-old to wrap their head around. I had to learn early on that I couldn’t trust what I saw and understand that other people’s visions didn’t split into two images. I hadn’t realized I was seeing the world differently than everyone else.
My experience is not universal, but it shows that even though kids are young, they can figure out that they are different and feel alienated and strange because of it. Being diagnosed gave a name for my experience, demystified it, and provided steps to improve my situation. The diagnosis and label of “different” are not what made me feel different; I already felt that way. It is important to help kids understand what is happening and why they have different experiences from their classmates.

I was pulled out of the classroom throughout elementary school because I was reading a grade level behind. By the time I was in 5th grade, I had understood that I had a learning disability and that I had difficulties with reading that other people didn’t. I understood why I was pulled out of the classroom for tests and began to look forward to being placed in a distraction-free environment. Having that name of “learning disability” for my experience also helped when one of my best friends told me I “wasn’t smart enough to get into the gifted and talented program.” Although that hurt, knowing about my LD helped me fight the fear that I wasn’t smart by knowing that there was a reason I had trouble in school.
Despite recognizing my learning disability, I still had trouble seeing myself as disabled. One reservation I had was that identifying as disabled would somehow take away from people with “real” disabilities. I didn’t want to take any resources from people with more intense disabilities and didn’t want to claim an identity that wasn’t meant for me.

While grappling with this in high school, I faced discrimination from my school’s guidance counselor. I had registered for a regular history course but wanted to change to an AP history course because it seemed more engaging and intellectually stimulating. I talked to my guidance counselor about changing classes in June, and it wasn’t until November, a quarter of the way through the course, that I was finally permitted to switch into the class. For six months, she blocked my request to change classes because she thought I could not handle the upper-level class. She decided for me that I was not capable rather than letting me decide for myself and, in the process, set me up to fail. Because she chose to stonewall my efforts to switch classes, I was two months behind everyone else in AP history when I joined and had to work twice as hard to get a decent final grade.

Experiencing discrimination from a woman who was supposed to be part of my support system crystalized for me that not only are bureaucratic systems not set up for students like me but also individuals within the education system routinely underestimate students with disabilities. This effectively takes away our agency and ability to achieve our goals. Obviously, some realities that students with disabilities live with cannot be changed, even with all the motivation and agency in the world. For instance, I am never going to read at an average reading speed; my eyes just physically cannot move that fast. But that doesn’t mean I can’t read textbooks and succeed in school. I can do just as well as my classmates when given the proper support and accommodations. It is a matter of getting me the resources to be able to succeed and giving me the support I need rather than forcing me to lower my expectations of what I can achieve. Level the playing field, don’t lower the bar.

Experiencing discrimination for the first (unfortunately not the last) time was one of the factors that really made me understand that my disability was not just an inconvenience but a truth that impacted every aspect of my life. It is not an internal psychological and emotional issue; it is a physiological issue that affects how I interact with the world and changes how people treat me.

After that incident, I realized that I don’t have to be “disabled enough” to claim my identity as a disabled person. What I slowly came to realize is that comparing disabilities is not helpful or necessary. No two disabled people have the same experience with being disabled, and thus no two disabled people are equally disabled; comparing disabilities doesn’t get anyone anywhere. One thing I wish I could tell my younger self is that the disability community overall is very accepting of people who identify as disabled. As a community, we don’t question if someone identifies as disabled since many disabilities are invisible, and people can have different experiences and still be disabled.

The process of realizing I had a disability empowered me and gave me a way to understand and frame the experiences I was having. And the absolute best part of claiming my disabled identity was being connected to a community of other disabled people. The disability community is big and welcoming, and extremely supportive. It made me feel less alone in what I was going through and able to connect with others who had similar perspectives.

Disability is not a dirty or degrading word. It is not something to be shied away from or euphemized with “special needs,” “challenged,” or “differently abled.” It is an identity that has meaning both in connecting to a community and in legal protections. Children know they are different, so pretending otherwise and teaching them that disability is a bad or shameful word will only hurt them in the long term. Instead, teaching them acceptance and strategies that work for them will give them the tools they need to succeed. So, to people with disabilities out there, you are allowed to identify as disabled, and to parents and teachers, teach your kids that disability is just a normal part of life, not something to be ashamed of. Disability is part of who I am, and rather than limiting my potential, it expands my world.

By Athena Hallberg

My learning disabilities and anxiety have always gone hand in hand; however, while I was diagnosed at a very young age with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and an auditory processing delay, my anxiety disorder went undiagnosed for years. My anxiety disorder was my biggest secret – the worst kept secret, but a secret all the same.
From a young age, I felt like a failure because I thought others perceived me as having learning disabilities, which contributed to my anxiety disorder. I had my first panic attack in kindergarten after filling out a worksheet backwards. I didn’t know why I wasn’t learning to read or write like my classmates. Why couldn’t I tell the difference between a “b” and a “d” or my right from my left? I knew something was wrong with me. I became very withdrawn, barely spoke, and sat by myself on a bench at recess because it was all too much.

That year, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and an auditory processing delay. My parents moved me to a school for first grade that specialized in learning disabilities. Over the years, I learned to read and write. I eventually excelled at school, but the fear that everyone would see me as a failure never went away. I feared it was only a matter of time before people realized I was worthless. The more I succeeded, the worse the anxiety became because, the more I felt like I was going to let everyone down.
When I have a panic attack, I feel like a monster is chasing me into a deep dark hole. The monster screams, “Failure, Failure!” while I try to run away but can’t because I can’t run away from myself. I knew this level of fear wasn’t normal, but I remained undiagnosed despite the obvious signs of my disorder.

I could hide the panic attacks mostly as they usually happened at home when I had time to think about school and all the ways I could fail. I also didn’t want the stigma of an anxiety disorder, and I was ashamed. I told myself my anxiety was just weakness, and I was selfish for not being able to handle everything on my own. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t know how to ask for help. In high school, I feared that if I revealed how much I struggled with anxiety, I would be pulled from the Advanced Placement and honors classes that I worked so hard to stay in despite my learning disabilities. Still, the fear was growing worse.

When I went to the University of Chicago, my anxiety didn’t go away. I feared that a former teacher was right about me when she said that not every child can succeed or go to college, even as I succeeded at a top-tier university. I was more terrified than ever to admit that I was struggling. I heard horror stories of peers’ colleges forcing them out or asking them to leave school when they admitted they were struggling with their mental health. Having been counseled out of a school before due to my disability, I was fearful that if I admitted I was struggling with anxiety, I would be pushed out, even though I had not heard of UChicago doing this to its students.

I finally accepted that I needed help when the fear grew so bad at the start of my junior year of college that my grades started to slip, and I couldn’t focus due to exhaustion from multiple panic attacks a week. It was only then, crying and shaking, I dragged myself into a therapist’s office.

Through cognitive behavioral therapy and a very light dose of medication, I no longer believe the lies. While my anxiety disorder is much better—I haven’t had a single panic attack in about a year—it shouldn’t have been such a struggle to seek help and find a diagnosis. It’s absurd that I spent so many years suffering due to fear and stigma.

My story isn’t unique. Studies suggest that LD individuals are twice as likely to struggle with mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, as the general public . Much of this correlation, I suppose, likely stems from the lasting impacts of educational trauma in a system that all too often fails LD children and repeatedly tells them that they are worthless from a young age.

I could have benefited from teachers better trained to help LD children. We need to recognize LD individuals as not just having reading issues or a processing delay. We need to see the whole person, including our other conditions often associated with learning disabilities. We need to provide support for those conditions as well. Together, we can eradicate stigma and help students get the support and resources they need.

By: Lizzy Arnold, Young Adult Leadership Council Member

Being a part of LD Day of Action, a time when young advocates like myself travel to D.C. to advocate for issues that impact students with LD, was an incredible experience, to say the least. Every other minute, I pinched myself, thinking, “is this actually happening? How did I get so lucky? I can’t wait to meet the people I’ve been talking with on Zoom for so long!” But as the amount of distance between me and D.C. became less and less, my thoughts became increasingly rooted in anxiety. “Am I even qualified for this? What if I’m not taken seriously? Congressional staff members won’t listen to me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.” I repeated these mantras of fear and inadequacy to myself until I believed them as facts.

When I met my fellow Young Adult Leadership Council (YALC) members in person, the people I’ve worked with for over two years, a sense of happiness and gratefulness rushed over me. We bonded over our excitement and trepidation about speaking to the staff of our Senators and Members of Congress. The support and mutual honesty that was shared between us gave me all the more purpose to share my story.

A group of us were exploring D.C. to take in all the amazing things the city had to offer, as well as document every second of our trip. During our exciting adventure, we decided to take pictures in front of the Washington Monument when I saw a disposable camera on the ground, which had appeared to be abandoned. I picked it up and saw that there were pictures left to be taken. Being in a silly mood, I took a couple of selfies with my friends in front of the monument, thinking nothing of it. As the eventful day continued, I held the camera in my hand, curious of what the pictures that were taken before me looked like. I figured there would be fun poses in front of famous sites, giant smiles, more poses, and maybe pictures of plaques with interesting historical facts. Similar to the pictures we took, after hours of advocating on behalf of the Learning-Disabled community.

Earlier that day, we had the opportunity to meet with Miguel Cardona, the US Secretary of Education, via Zoom. He responded to many concerns raised by other YALC and Eye to Eye members with an interest and goal of hearing our troubling experiences and suggestions of how the education system needs to improve. He even shared the challenges he faced, being Latino in the classroom. The stereotypes that were thrown at him growing up and feeling a need to prove those stereotypes wrong by getting an education. His words gave me hope for the future of education as well as gave me more of a perspective on what it is like for minority students in school.

The next step was meeting with the staff members for our senators and representatives. One meeting, in particular, was with a staff member representing the district I lived in. Once we sat down, she told me that she was interested in hearing more about my experience with the education system and even took notes while I was speaking.

I wanted her, as well as every other person I met with, to see me as a confident, intelligent, and strong woman who wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s one of the reasons I wore a badass cheetah print, shoulder-padded top along with pants and a fitted blazer to match. So, no one could ignore what I had to say, even if they tried. It worked, and this woman took me seriously. I explained to her how the public school system has disregarded the needs of learning-disabled students and ignored their IEPs and 504 plans. How fewer than 34% of disabled students graduate from 4-year institutions within eight years, even though 90% of them are considered college ready, and how many LD research centers are severely underfunded. Afterward, she told me, “Well, it can’t be that bad. You turned out to be fine.”

I was taken aback by this comment. She had no idea what disabled students go through daily and disregarded the collective need to improve the system. She had no idea what it had taken for me to get to this point. She didn’t see the unsure, scared girl that had her educational needs overlooked for years and struggled to speak up for herself.

I hadn’t realized it but growing up, I’ve always tried my best to drown out that little girl’s voice in an effort to move on and escape the pain of feeling like I wasn’t enough. I explained to her how lost I had been growing up and how this community was what saved me. That I am the lucky exception, who was provided opportunities that most people are not. When I joined the National Center for Learning Disabilities’ YALC and was supported by people who shared similar experiences as me, I realized that the difficult experiences we endured became our collective motivation to change the education system for the better to support learning-disabled students.

I could see the expression on her face change as she began to understand my perspective. She had told me that she wanted to be a mother one day and wanted the school system to be the best it could be for her child. I replied, “My parents wanted the same for me.”

I knew in my heart that my story was important to tell. Individuals with LDs need to have their voices heard because changing people’s perceptions has a ripple effect.

After I came home from D.C. and LD Day of Action was over, I had a chance to look through the pictures on the unclaimed camera that I found on the field in front of the Washington Monument (p.s. I’m trying to find the owners of this camera so they can get their pictures) this camera let me into the lives of people I’ve never met, and millions more in D.C. alone. Each of these people have experiences that are unique and personal to them. And 1 of every 20 of those people has a learning disability.

I want those people to know: There is room for me, and there is room for you in this narrative. Share your story because vulnerability is a superpower.