People Hear My Voice and Decide What I Know

I have a bachelor’s degree in communications from West Texas A&M. Twenty years in IT. I write. I podcast. I consult on AI. I’ve been doing all of this from a power wheelchair since before the iPhone existed.

And still, people slow down when they talk to me. It’s often worse than that. Most people aren’t sure I can speak until I do.

I’m not talking about strangers on the street. I’m talking about doctors who address the person next to me first. Colleagues in meetings who glance at my aide like they’re looking for a translator. Restaurant servers who skip me completely and ask whoever I’m with what I’d like to order, and that one isn’t rare, it happens to me on a regular basis.

I’ve got a favorite version of that last one. Dinner with my parents, years back, a server asks the table what I’d like, meaning everyone at it but me, and I answer for myself before anybody else gets the chance. My dad gets this annoyed look on his face. When the waiter asks what’s wrong, my dad tells him: we just spent the last hour trying to get him to shut up, and you just got him started again.

Cerebral palsy affects movement. It doesn’t decide what you know.

CP is damage to the developing brain that affects how the body moves. That’s it. Whether your cognition comes along for the ride depends entirely on which part of the brain was affected and how severely. Depending on the source, somewhere between half and seventy percent of people with CP have typical cognitive function. A lot of us are just stuck in a body that makes other people nervous.

Mine makes people nervous. I get that. The chair, the way my hands work, the cadence of my speech when I’m tired. I’ve been the most visually prominent person in almost every room I’ve entered for 47 years.

The nervousness doesn’t stay in the body. It migrates up.

People who wouldn’t dream of questioning whether someone who uses a cane can do calculus will absolutely assume a person in a wheelchair can’t communicate. It’s not intentional. That’s kind of the point. It’s baked into how we talk about disability. The visuals of significant physical impairment have been culturally coded as cognitive impairment.

It’s frustrating.

When I clock a guy who isn’t taking me seriously, I’ve got a move. I’ll say something sharp, a little trash talk, nothing planned, just enough that whatever he thought he knew about me stops making sense in real time. Say something a guy in a wheelchair isn’t supposed to say, in a tone he wasn’t expecting, and his whole filing system breaks in about two seconds. It’s not always the nice version of me. It works anyway.

That move doesn’t work on women. You don’t get to come at a woman that way in polite company, and I wouldn’t want to even if I could. With a guy, I’ve got a shortcut: something sharp enough, unexpected enough, to force the correction fast. With a woman, I don’t have that button. So the same assumption, whether I’m all there or not, just sits there longer, because it takes her actually taking the time to find out, and I don’t have a way to speed that up. That’s not a request for pity. It’s just what I’ve experienced, repeatedly, for a long time.

Every time someone decides who I am before I open my mouth, I have a choice: correct them, or let it go. I’ve been doing that since kindergarten.

I’m not asking anyone to feel bad about it. I’m asking people to notice when it’s happening. Notice when you’re waiting for me to finish my sentence versus waiting to see if I can. They’re different waits, and most people don’t know which one they’re doing.

I built a career out of communication. That was not a coincidence.