[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid,” Einstein once said – and the world would be a better place if we were to remember these words more often. This week, Bristol poet Hannah Gallivan writes about her experience living much of her life in a wheelchair. It is not her own disability that holds her back, however, but others’ misguided and hurtful assumptions that her physical setback is the only quality that defines her.
My Life Through Someone Else’s Eyes
By Hannah Gallivan
[I] like to think I am invincible,
but sometimes I am not invincible
to the words that follow me around.
I live my life on wheels –
four, to be exact, and I am used to it.
But some people are not.
They think I am not able…
just because I have a disability.
They stare, and when I see them stare,
they pretend that they haven’t been looking.
But inside, I know they have been,
and when I walk they seem surprised –
like I am sick and can’t ever walk.
But I can, and sometimes I feel judged.
They say things like,
“She can’t run, let’s wait for her,”
and I want to show them
just how fast I can fly.