When I got my first power wheelchair … I felt like a queen I We went to the grocery store that night … everybody said I was beaming. I hadn’t learned to drive it well, and I was going up and down the aisles. I almost hit some of the displays. But I was happy. I was just exuberant. To be able to do something under my own power was wonderful.
– Tarri, Friedreich’s Ataxia
Independent living? It means to have your own room. Keep your room clean. Like, sometimes when my boyfriend’s real sick I take him to the hospital or he takes me to the hospital. We go to different places. Like, we go to the Oakland Zoo, or sometimes to the San Francisco Zoo, or we go to the airport.
– Lynn, mentally retarded
My father was most patient during my first experience of driving. He placed his two VW’s on the street so I could learn to park, and pass my driver’s test. When I went for the road test, two police officers went with me. They were interested in the special foot controls … and I gave them a detailed explanation of how I worked them.
– Norma, double arm amputee
I am twenty years old and have only recently moved out on my own. When I first left home, I had no idea what to expect. I found myself in strange surroundings. I was not sure if I could do everything that I needed to do for myself. As time went on and I began to become familiar with my surroundings and abilities, I found myselffeeling much better about my situation.
– Lori, partially sighted.
The first time I picked up Amy’s harness, I felt I could see again, I really felt free. It was a beautiful feeling. Amy and I are like a ballet team … When we have time, we walk three to six miles a day.
– Judy, blind
My parents were convinced that I wasn’t capable ofliving on my own. I decided that I was, even though I didn’t know anyone who had done it. I even had a rehab. counselor come out to the house to explain to them that I could live on my own but they didn’t believe him because he was blind, like me.
Then I started getting scared. People started saying you don’t have any sheets, any towels. I also didn’t have any money.
One afternoon my mother and I were sitting in the dentist’s office and we started having the same argument about my moving out that had been going on for a few years. I wanted to, she didn’t want me to. My mother had to leave the room for a while. All of a sudden, someone sitting in the room said, “Hey, if you want to move out, move out.” And I said, “You’re right.” And after that there was no turning back. One of my brothers said he would help as soon as I had turned eighteen and graduated. I did move out but I wasn’t successful at it, had to keep going back home, until I spent some time at an independent living center for blind people.
– Sheila, blind
I was ready when I ieft the school for the blind to live on my own. On my seventeenth birthday, I decided I’d move out in a year. During that whole year, I bought towels and dishes and stuff with money saved from my SSI check. I had everything I needed when my eighteenth birthday came.
– Margie, blind
One day during the spring break from college, I had the nerve to ask my father for a car of my own, thinking he would say okay. But instead, he shook the world out of me with a message, as if my dependence on him for financial support must have drawn to an end. The words came out like, “If you want a car, earn your own money and buy yourself one.” From then on I made up my mind to do what I knew would be best for me and for my future well-being.
I could have persuaded him to buy the car for me anyway, and I could have paid part of the expense. But I didn’t want it that way. I wanted to work for the summer, and I tried to ask my mother to help me find a job when I came home from college for the summer. She was really reluctant, and I felt really frustrated. I decided to write to the mayor of my home town. He passed the letter on to some group, and that group wrote back to me and said they would have an opening for a summer job.
Later when I came home, my mother told me that someone from that office had come to the house to ask about me. My mother was really stunned: she didn’t know if I was really doing the right thing, because it looked like maybe I was going over someone’s head. But I had to have a job. I knew that being deaf and black, there might not be anything for me, but I felt I needed to begin to be independent and responsible. I wondered if I got the job. I wanted my mother to call for me but she was reluctant. I really became frustrated. Luckily, I got a letter saying that I was hired. The interesting thing was that I was the only black person there and the only disabled person there.
I feel that the best way anyone can get anything is to fight for themselves, no matter what their sex or race or religion or color or culture. That was really my first step to lead me into fighting back against my disability.
– Lois, deaf
Every human being, except the hermit in the desert who raises his own food, is dependent on other people – for material things like food and roads, all the way up to intangibles like love and a sense of purpose in life. In parts of Africa, water is so scarce that the women of some tribes spend eight hours every day hiking to and from the area’s well to gather enough water for their families’ needs for one day. For people like us with running water, such a way of life seems almost inhuman, an insult to human potential. Probably all the women visit together during that long walk, but still . . . Well, it’s the same for me. Without help, it takes me three hours to get dressed and out of bed in the morning. With the help of a paid attendant, I can be in my van and on my way to work in 45 minutes. I am independent to the same extent that a non-disabled person is; I can choose where I will work, who my friends are.
– Paula, post polio