About

When I was in elementary school, it did not take me very long to realize that I was treated differently from my classmates.

I was often pulled out of my homeroom to work with a special education teacher, none of my other classmates had an adult helper assisting them, and my peers were the first people to tell me I had autism, not my parents. However, my parents and my special education team fought to make sure I had the best education and social life possible, and because of that, elementary school was a breeze despite my being treated differently.

All this was thrown out the window when I started middle school. The work got harder, recess no longer existed, and my peers started reenacting what they saw in the media more than the teachings of their parents. My middle school had students who went to the same elementary school as well as from the other two elementary schools in the district, so two-thirds of the sixth grade did not know who I was. The shock of the transition from elementary school to middle school especially hit me hard as an autistic kid. I started to experience meltdowns and because of that, my classmates began to laugh at me. To help them understand my disability, I created a PowerPoint where I talked about my disability as well as a couple interests that I had, so my peers could see me less as someone who makes them uncomfortable, and more as someone who is worth befriending.

While the PowerPoint presentation worked in terms of changing my classmates’ attitudes, I did not come to terms with the fact that I was part of a marginalized group until I was in high school.

For my ninth-grade year, I moved from Seattle to the Bay Area. I thought I needed to start over in terms of making friends and I thought finding my people was going to be just as slow as it was in my elementary and middle school years. Eventually, I was introduced to disability rights advocacy. My first internship, which took place in the summer between my tenth and eleventh grade years, was at Magical Bridge Playground, the Bay Area’s first playground designed with the purpose of people with physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and no disabilities to play on together, regardless of their age. My fellow teen volunteers, known as Kindness Ambassadors, were my first real friend group, and it felt so good to be seen and heard as not only a Kindness Ambassador, but also a member of the disability community. From that point on, I found it important to preach the idea that people with and without disabilities should be treated equally wherever I went. I based all the subsequent friend groups I chose to join off of how welcoming and inclusive everyone was in the Magical Bridge Kindness Ambassador Program. I also made sure to educate others about important laws and court cases that are meant to protect people like me from ableism such as Section 504, the ADA, and Olmstead.

Today, I am 23 going on 24, and my disability rights advocacy has changed the world for good in many ways.

I met the former congressman who sponsored the ADA. I helped a fellow Division I band kid raise enough money to replace her wheelchair, which was damaged on her band’s charter flight for a bowl game. I invited the President and Vice President of my college’s student council to my disability rights advocacy group’s weekly meeting to talk about how they could address ableism on campus, and they accepted. I contacted the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods to express interest in a disability history project they were working on, and I ended up writing blog posts and facilitating a panel at the Museum of History and Industry for that project. On another disability rights advocacy panel that I facilitated, one of my coworkers told me that in his twenty years of disability rights advocacy, he had never seen three legal workers come together to talk about disability on the same panel. I created this website because I would love it if my disability rights advocacy went even further. I would be happy to speak at any event that you would like me to guest-speak at, whether it is in-person or online.