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From: LIL ( Lillian Gonzales Brown)
Date: 03 Oct 2000
Time: 15:06:32
Remote Name: spider-tm041.proxy.aol.com
Wow! I've finally sat down and read everything posted from the start - what a read! Since I'm going to be around for awhile throwing my two cents worth in,I'd like to tell you all a bit about me. I am a woman born with my disability - a medical mystery - with a mother who also shared the same disability. this gave me the somewhat unique experience of having a disabled role model while growing up. So many mixed messages! A mom who worked, was married, and had three kids (an ideal many women strived for at that time). How "normal" could you get? One the one hand she taught me I could do anything I set my mind to-disability or not. Then there was the outside world that stared, were rude, saw and spoke of me in terms such as 'defective','crippled', and so on. I had the medical model with 7 years in hospitals accompanied by 24 surgeries. None of that led to a great sel esteem. I was mainstreamed, "normalized', and I didn't fit. I know this is familiar to all of you in one way or another. Along with the shaky self esteem I had my mom's encouragement which helped a lot. I learned a lot about advocacy from her wathcing her fight with the docs. I "grew up" and married just after my 21st B'day. What a rite of passage, he was non disabled! A few years later I heared about an org called CIL in Berkeley, and through a seties of events ended up working there. It felt like coming home. I didn't have to try to pass, I could just be me and be accepted. A real gift. During my stint working at CIL,and then the newly formed World Institute on Disability (WID),I met crips from all over the world, then began to travel to other countries to do work. What I discovered during those years is that it didn't matter what "culture" you were in, the issues remained the same. The self esteem issues, the life survival isues, and on and on. When Steve and I found each other and began to talk about these things it really strengthened our mental picture of "Disability Culture", then led to the birth of the Institute on Disability Culture.
That is my so called nutshell self introduction. If this site becomes that kind of conversation space we can help each other get a clear mental picture of our culture and create as we go along. So many of the contributions in just the last months are juicy for discussion - let's keep on going!
Thanks for listening to my meanderings, hope to hear from you all soon. LIL