I’m not an emotional person; I evade emotions with others through humor and deflection. My emotions happen internally when no one is around. You asked me yesterday how I felt about my time mono-skiing with [the Adaptive Sports Center] and in my true fashion I cracked a joke and brushed it off with a short surface level response. Because if I were to let you all know in that moment how this all had made me feel, I would have lost it. My walls would have come down and I wouldn’t have been able to pull it together. But I think it’s important for you all to know at least this, so I wrote it down: Yesterday falling didn’t feel like failure, fatigue didn’t feel like loss, and a win was a win any way you spun it. I haven’t felt like me in a long time. When a disability changes you in such a physical way, you grieve the person that you were, you grieve the capabilities that no longer belong to you, and you are left with this void that you have to fill. It is always an option to retreat, give up, lose love for your life, and become angry and jaded—to fall and not get back up. That was never my option. It is not within me to stay down. Through this program and others like it with a similar mission, I am on a journey to find myself again. It’s easy to throw in the towel; it’s hard to throw caution to the wind and realize that if you try and it doesn’t turn out the way you planned you are no worse for the wear. Living with a physical disability has allowed me to look at the world through a different lens, and once that shifts the world never looks quite the same. I better understand the physical barriers that are more obvious, but now I also understand how much of your identity is pinned down to what people see on the outside without ever knowing you. This label is heavy and feels so isolating, suffocating. Over time you get a hard skin, you learn to block it out, and you keep moving forward. I snowboarded with you guys before this happened and loved you all for how much you have molded my sister into who is working with you now. I saw my sister reveal to you all the person that she is with only a select few and grow in ways that at the time I didn’t fully understand. But now I see this program through a different lens. I rolled into Adaptive yesterday and though I looked different from the last time, each and every one of you saw past that and saw just me. You saw the scientist, the jokester, you saw the loving sister, you saw the strength and the armor, and you saw the capable athlete. But most of all, without a word you saw my need for compassion and understanding. To the rest of the world, most of these are invisible behind the shadow of my disability, but not here. I felt at peace knowing that it didn’t matter what shape I showed up in, you guys were just happy that I came. It’s places like this that are the light in the dark, a beacon for all of us facing struggles in a world designed without us in mind. The world often tells us no, you can’t, it’s impossible. But here there is a different message, one that says, “You are strong, you are capable, we are here, you are home.” Places like this are too few in my opinion, so when you are fortunate enough to find it, parts of yourself that lay dormant, kept safe under that thick skin, starts to shine through. I understand now more than ever how pivotal community is when you face new challenges and your life turns upside down. There are a lot of things that I would love to change about the world to make it better for [people with disabilities]. But Adaptive isn’t one of them. You give people like Kristen and me an incredible gift—the gift of being seen. Thank you for giving me back a piece of myself I didn’t realize how much I had missed. Thank you for not looking at me but seeing me. If there are words that hold higher weight in terms of gratitude, you have those as well, because without this—this community, this support—I would be truly lost, and would never have had the strength to get back up. You all are allowed ten seconds of sappy; I’ll be over here awkwardly counting and refusing to make eye contact. Lauren, an Adaptive Sports Center participant | December 2023
