How Aware Are We, Really?

My physical therapist has been after me for weeks to fix my posture.

"Stop looking down," she tells me. "Look up."

So on my walk this morning, I tried.

I've walked the same neighborhood for years. The same sidewalks. The same houses. The same trees. Yet somehow, looking up instead of down, I noticed something I'd never seen before—a beautiful, three-story birdhouse perched high in someone's yard.

How had I missed it?

It made me wonder how much of life we walk past without ever really seeing.

Then my thoughts drifted to disability.

We hear the word awareness all the time. Disability Awareness. Autism Awareness. Mental Health Awareness. We hold awareness days, awareness months, awaresociety or community.

But have we really become more aware, really??

Or have we simply become more exposed?

Yesterday I participated in a 5K for Disability Awareness for the OTR organization in Evanston, Illinois with my daughter, Shea, who uses a wheelchair, and my sister. I realized I spend so much of my life immersed in the disability community that I sometimes forget most people don't.

Disability isn't part of everyone's everyday experience. Most people aren't intentionally looking away. They're simply living their own lives, focused on work, family, kids, schedules, and everything else that fills all of our days.

And then I realized something else, I often miss things too.  I make assumptions about people.

Even after twenty one years of raising Shea and working alongside people with disabilities, I still catch myself filling in blanks about someone before I know their story.

Awareness isn't something I've accomplished.  It is not a destination I have fully achieved, or a place I have gotten to.

That realization humbled me.  Because if awareness is simply being around people with disabilities, then shouldn't all of us who know someone with a disability have it figured out by now?

The truth is, awareness isn't something we achieve once.  It is something that has to be practiced, and modeled for everyone around us.

Even I catch myself making assumptions.

When I see an adult wheelchair user alone on the street, my mind sometimes fills in details I don't actually know. I have to stop and remind myself that I know nothing about their life. They may have a spouse waiting at home. Children. A job and career they love. Friends meeting them for dinner. Dreams they are pursuing.  Travels they are planning, and new adventures ahead of them.

Awareness means catching ourselves in those moments.

Today, I walked with kids at a summer camp playing and running. One little girl was far behind the others. Her gait was different. Her legs were stiff. She wasn't even close to keeping up.

My heart immediately went to her, because I knew that different gait very well.  I have seen it in kids with disabilities for twenty years.  I wondered what she was thinking. Was she already comparing herself to everyone else? Or has someone in her life helped her understand that moving differently doesn't mean she is different, or not worth as much as everyone else?

Every child deserves that message.  Every adult probably does, too.

Maybe that's what awareness really is.  Not memorizing and using the "right" words.  Not finding that cute phrase like differently-abled you think makes it all so much more palatable.

Not believing we fully understand autism because we know one autistic person.

Not assuming we understand cerebral palsy because we've met someone who uses a wheelchair.

Real awareness really starts when we recognize how much we don't know.

When we ask questions instead of making assumptions.

When we choose to really see the person standing in front of us.

That birdhouse had been there all along.

I just wasn't looking up.