Day 1 of Invisible Disabilities Week - time for a re-introduction!
Today’s the start of Invisible Disabilities Week - a good time for a (re-)introduction! ✨
So hi! I’m Lauren - invisible disability speaker, accessibility advocate & frequent yay-sayer (fun fact, my 8th grade yearbook has one of my Favourite Sayings as “Yay!” so that part of me has been around a longgg time 😄)
I was born with Central Core Disease, a rare muscle disorder where some of the mitochondria in my muscle cells is missing. You might’ve seen the meme that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, converting food into energy and energy into strength. My own strength is about 33% of the average person, so a lot of things are harder for me.
Even though I was born with it, I was undiagnosed until I was 20, and didn’t hear the 33% strength part until 26. Pre-20, I knew I had a muscle disability, but not what, and pre-26, had no idea how far off I was from the average person.
With no language or terms to understand/explain it, and with a lot of internalized ableism, I hid it as much as I could for 30+ years. I used to tear up anytime I had to tell someone new - I’ve only been open for the last 3 years.
That’s when I spoke about it for the first time in a Speaker Slam competition - because I’d seen other speakers with disabilities share their stories, and was like “wait, we can talk about it?!” I’d never seen the point of sharing it before, and realized maybe the point was to help others feel seen, the way those speakers did for me.
6 months later, I competed again, to get more comfortable talking about it. I qualified for the 2023 Grand Slam finals, became the #2 Inspirational Speaker of the Year with this speech, and things took off!
Now, I’m a keynote speaker on invisible disabilities, resilience and belonging, the first and only Invisible Disabilities Association (IDA) Ambassador in Canada, and an Ambassador for the Rick Hansen Foundation School Program. I’ve had 20+ media features, and raised over $5,000 USD for the IDA. Best of all, I get to be part of the disability representation for others, that I never knew I needed for myself.
And I truly believe every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place. ✨
