I wrote the essay below for a school essay contest about what would make our community “better together”.
The idea of feeling different from everyone else is a good justification for why you don’t have any friends …until you want to make friends. Somewhere along the way, feeling different becomes an excuse for various deficiencies in life that didn’t matter so much, until you become serious about contemplating another life. Soon, you set a goal to find a friend who just accepts you, despite your diagnosis.
However, the unspoken rule of friendship is that speaking is really important to any growing relationship. This only presents a problem when you actually can’t speak, due to a diagnosis that you are stuck with for the rest of your life, despite every possible attempt to cure yourself. That is the situation I find myself in. I have a diagnosis that prevents me from easily communicating with people without the use of a keyboard or letterboard. Would the fact that you have to learn how to use a letterboard prevent you from saying something to me? Probably. That’s the main learning-related hurdle I face, when it comes to making friends.
The fact is that getting your attention is hard to do when I just thought of something funny. But no one holds up a letterboard in front of me so that I can share my joke with the room. So I keep it to myself, and the conversation keeps going. This usually happens to me several times an hour, depending on who’s doing what and how much I can pay attention to. A choice has been made for me, and there is nothing I can do about it. You don’t even realize you’ve made this choice, but you have by not giving me the tools I need to participate in the conversation.
Having a diagnosis like mine makes it difficult to find people that I both like and want to befriend, given the fact of my communication issue. My diagnosis is just one example of many possible hurdles between people. Unfortunately, friendships can’t blossom unless both people are standing on equal footing. Maybe before assuming people with diagnoses like mine are not friend material, however, you could give us a chance to show you who we really are and try to figure out how to bring us into your conversations. This would go a long way in making the world a better, kinder, and more interesting place. Be stronger and braver than you think your friends expect you to be, so that the disabled person in the room can share that incredibly funny joke with you.
The world is a better place with a diversity of voices in it. Bringing more people to the table does not mean giving those seats to only those who are able to communicate through traditional methods. Try to foster friendships that don’t distinguish between those who can speak with their actual mouths, and those speaking from their implied mouths. These might become the kind of friends who mean the most to you in the end–the friends who give you the three things you need in life: good advice, jokes, and honest visions of how they see you.
Find opportunities to reach out to previously excluded, unrecognized people, who may offer an independent point of view that is distinct from yours. Friendship brings the best gift of all: greater understanding between individuals, eventually tying them together in a bond that transcends disability and difference. Even though I believe that friendships shouldn’t be driven by the need for diversity, I also believe that having a friend who is different enough to challenge you to believe new things has real value in this world.
Understanding how hard it is to be optimistic, I choose to give this world love because I make it happier by doing so. You can really free yourself by doing the same thing and forming relationships with people you previously assumed were somehow off-limits. You should give it a try! Just remember: real friendship should be based on what you value, and not on people’s status updates. Work on noticing the people who fade into the background. Realize that we are here. Learn how to include us in your world. B
Will you join me in this crusade to make this world a little kinder?