Hi [FIRST NAME GOES HERE],

I hope your July is off to a great start. Here in Oregon, the temperatures are nearing 100 degrees. I've been making the most of the mornings outdoors before retreating to the air conditioning as the heat intensifies.

I am feeling so grateful for air conditioning, which helps so much with regulating temperature — and feeling a lot of sadness for those who are dealing with hot temperatures without air conditioning, especially those with sensory sensitivities. Wherever you are this July, I hope you’re able to find the right spaces that meet your sensory needs.

Disability Pride Month

This past week, I've been reflecting on the diverse needs of humanity and the efforts to address them, especially as July marks Disability Pride Month. This month is an opportunity to celebrate and honor the disability community and our experiences, as well as the progress that has been made. In the United States, Disability Pride Month coincides with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a pivotal moment in protecting the rights of disabled people.

Disability Pride is about embracing and celebrating each person’s uniqueness, recognizing it as a natural and beautiful aspect of human diversity. I’ll be honest, this can feel a bit more challenging when it comes to a disabled identity. Disability is often cast as tragic, making it seem like a counterintuitive thing to celebrate.

Complicating matters, many of us also experience complex emotions and grief around our disabilities. So, Disability Pride becomes not just a celebration but also an act of resilience and defiance. It's about acknowledging our struggles and complex emotions while choosing to honor our identity and the strength that comes with it.

A Brief History

The disability rights movement began in the 1960s. Progress was slow until the landmark "Capitol Crawl" on March 12, 1990. After months of Congressional inaction, over 1000 protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand the approval of ADA. The chant "What do we want? ADA! When do we want it? NOW!" resonated as more than 60 activists abandoned their mobility devices and crawled up the Capitol steps, casting a spotlight on the barriers faced by disabled individuals.

Disability Pride Flag

The Disability Pride flag is newer to the scene. It was originally designed in 2019 by writer Ann Magill, who has cerebral palsy. It symbolizes solidarity, pride, and acceptance. Motivated by her disappointment at the limited visibility of an ADA anniversary event, Magill created the flag to raise awareness. The original design featured brightly colored zigzagging stripes on a black background, representing the barriers people with disabilities navigate.

However, feedback from the community, particularly concerning visually triggered disabilities, led to a redesign in 2021. The updated flag features straightened, muted stripes and reordered colors for better accessibility, symbolizing various types of disabilities:

• red for physical disabilities
• gold for neurodiversity
• white for invisible and undiagnosed disabilities
• blue for emotional and psychiatric disabilities
• green for sensory disabilities.

You can read more about the flag and it’s history here.

Why Disability Pride Matters:

• Community and Belonging: People with disabilities often face stigma and isolation. Building a sense of community and belonging is crucial in combating these challenges. Disability Pride Month fosters a supportive environment where individuals can connect, share experiences, and find solidarity amidst societal barriers.
• Advocacy and Awareness: Disability Pride events highlight the importance of advocacy and the continuous efforts needed to improve accessibility and inclusion.

Understanding Disability:

There are various models to understand disability, including:

• The Medical Model: Views disability as a problem to be fixed or cured.
• The Social Model: Sees disability as occurring at the intersection of a person’s impairment and societal barriers and attitudes. This model emphasizes removing these barriers to create an inclusive society.

Recognizing the different frameworks for understanding disability can be deeply empowering. Each model has its strengths and limits, and it's not about finding the "right" one but understanding there are several different frameworks for talking and thinking critically about disability (to learn more about different models of disability check out Kaligirwa’s (BlackSpectrumScholar) resources on Instagram. She has a two part series that explains different models of disability (part one here and part two here).

Some Facts About Disability:

• 1 in 5 people are disabled.
• Disability is a unique identity group, in that it is one of the few marginalized identity experiences that is an equal opportunity group. While many are born disabled, it is also a group that any human can join at any point in their life, and most do if they live long enough.

Some Cool Resources on Disability I’ve consumed this week.

• ​Ologies Podcast: This Ologies episode with Disability Sociologist, Guinevere Chambers, does a fantastic job highlighting the history of the disability movement, the sociology of disability and so much more
• ​This instagram post by Britt Hawthorne does a great job educating on current affirming language used. ​

Disability Pride Month can be a complex experience, especially since many of us navigate multiple disabilities. Personally, I have very different relationships with my various disabilities. It's easier for me to embrace and take pride in my autism and ADHD, whereas I have a more strained relationship with the aspects of disability related to long COVID, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue. This complexity is a reminder that pride can coexist with challenges and ongoing struggles.

Whether you yourself are disabled, are grappling with whether this is an identity group you belong to, or support disabled people, I wish you a happy Disability Pride Month. My personal goal this month is to seek out learning about disability beyond the neurodivergent space. Much of my understanding has come from within the neurodivergent community, and to counteract that bias, I am intentionally seeking knowledge from other disability communities.

Please feel free to share your favorite resources, especially those geared toward audio learning, such as podcasts. Thank you for joining me on this journey of awareness and celebration.

Warmly,

Megan Anna

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Neurodivergent Insights

★彡 Weekly Roundup ★彡

🎙New on the Podcast

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This week on the podcast we get a bit existential. We discuss how easy it is to create an idealized or romanticized version of our future selves. So we yet again grapple with the grief and complexity of fantasy, reality, and our shared struggles of finding presence.

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💻 Updated Infographic

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This week I re-shared my updated PTSD and ADHD Venn Diagram on social media. These are some of the toughest conditions to tease a part (and they often co-occur). You can see the updated diagram here as well as read about the complexity of PTSD and ADHD.

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📖 Community Update

The Learning Nook is 9 months old! It's an active and vibrant community, which I've recently realized means it can feel like a lot to walk into! So this last week I put in work to improve our onboarding experience by adding an intro course to get oriented.

Now that I feel more confident people can comfortably integrate into our community with a bit less friction I'll probably be a bit more proactive in talking about it.

We continue to accept 20 new members a month, and right now all 20 seats for July are open. You can read more about our ​community​ here.

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🖤💚🩵 Disability Pride Sale 🤍💛❤️

If you yourself are disabled, or support disabled people in your work, please enjoy 40% off the shop this week in celebration of who you are and the work you do.

You can use the code DisabilityPride to receive 40% off anything in the shop.
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📩 Pass It On

If you're finding value in these weekly resources, you can share this newsletter with friends and colleagues. You can just forward this email or send them here to sign up.

Thanks for being here. I'll catch you next week.

Dr. Neff