There is no explaining how it feels To look forward to an event An accessible event And arrive to find No access, no welcome Then It just becoming A quiet drive home. Then A dawning realization That it continues Without me. Then How unnecessary I am. How is it that isolation is so incredibly well […]
The tires on my new wheelchair are air filled. This is new for me. My old reliable chair, which I’m sitting in now as I type, had solid rubber tires. I was wary of the new tires because I could just picture what a flat would mean, the trouble it would cause, and the idea […]
Yesterday I went to a new grocery store feeling a sense of ‘so there!’ to the place I’ve shopped since moving to Newmarket. My former store was one I liked, and is closer, but as much as I tried I couldn’t get them to take even the most minimal action to make the store accessible […]
I’ve been taking our travels, and all the time I have in my new wheelchair, as an opportunity to practice my outdoor pushing. This means, for example, pushing from the parking spot to the hotel rather than being dropped off at the front door. It also means seeing a funky looking coffee shop across the […]
Compassion. Real Compassion. Is hard work. We were on the plane ready to fly home. It was the first flight in the morning and we’d gotten up very early to ensure we got there with time enough for things to go wrong. That is our strategy, it works for us. But by the time we […]
Several times on this trip I discovered that my “no,” even firmly said, held no power. This was my first trip, by plane, in my new wheelchair. I’m adapting to the chair, it’s quite a different ‘push’ than my old chair and I use different muscles in my arms and shoulders. This means that I […]
We were uncomfortable straight away. Only minutes after seating ourselves in the restaurant, we started wishing we’d ordered room service. We never go out for dinner, well, maybe not never, but rarely. We are tired at the end of a work day and like to tuck ourselves away from the world. But we’d seen the […]
I had the oddest experience the other day. I was in a grocery store and had been unable to find what I was looking for. Joe and I went looking for a staff. We saw a woman off in the distance giving directions to someone else and appeared friendly in doing so. So we approached […]
Below is a transcript of the tape that was made of my speech at the Inspire Awards, given out by Toronto’s LGBT community, at the ceremony on May 5th. The beginning and ending are from memory, which is unreliable, the middle is from the portion of my speech that was recorded. (Joe assists me with […]
Today I will be receiving a lifetime achievement award at the “Inspire” ceremony here in Toronto from the LGBTQQ+ community. It’s for my work regarding sexuality, adulthood, and self advocacy with people who have intellectual disabilities. I feel humbled by the award and challenged by the fact that I have one minute to speak after […]
