Participant Stories:                    

Often people living with disabilities are defined by their disability, not by who they are. Typically, the first thing we learn about someone with a disability is their disability – that they are autistic, or have Alzheimer’s, or an acquired brain injury, or any of a host of conditions classified as a disability. Sometimes this is the only thing we learn about them, and we remain oblivious to the things that may have moulded, motivated and mattered to them. Collecting the stories featured in People of adaptCARE is an attempt to go beyond this default setting; it seeks to redress this oversight by providing a platform for people who are living with a disability, and who are part of the adaptCARE family, give voice to their bigger selves and story.

Not all participants are able to tell their story or can only tell part of it directly. Where that has been the case, their stories have been provided or supplemented by family members/carers. In all instances interviews were candidly collected and recorded in note form. Stories unfurled unfettered. No set interview questions were used during the interview process, other than being asked or prompted to give or expand on basic information, such as where they grew up, if they had siblings, what jobs and/or hobbies they had.

The decision to write people’s stories rather than record or film the telling of them was done for several reasons. For many, telling their story can be a fractured or fragmented process, requiring the pieces be reassembled to provide a coherent picture. Additionally, as the objective was to avoid focusing on an individual’s disabilities, recording or filming interviews potentially posed a distraction that would potentially defeat/undermine the purpose of collecting them.

The stories are short. Their aim is to show the individuality and personality of the interviewees, not their disability.  While there is no attempt to hide the very real difficulties and challenges people experience living with a disability, the focus is more on the things that make them who they are. The intention is not to downplay the impact disabilities have on lives, nor elide the very real and hard slog of living that people can face daily.  Rather, they serve to highlight people living with a disability are not a homogeneous group; they are diverse individuals with unique stories to tell.