Inspiration Award – Cortland Celebrations 2022
Inspiration Award – Alison Bryan’s Speech
Thank you.
I want to start out by saying that there’s a lot of pressure getting an award for “Inspiration” because people are going to expect me to say something “inspiring” in my acceptance speech.
So, I’ve been praying about what to say, and I’m gonna go with what I feel God has given me.
I’d like to share two events that happened to me that have deeply impacted my life, and subsequently my work at Racker.
But first a little background info: I am one of four daughters. My oldest sister, Barbara, we now know was born with Autism. Now that word wasn’t used much in the 60’s; my parents told me she was “brain damaged” because that’s what they were told. My youngest sister, Pauline, was born with a profound sensorineural hearing loss – Deaf.
So I’m a sibling. As a sibling, I have a unique perspective of the impact of disabilities on a family.
The first event I want to share centers around my sister Barbara. In the 1960’s, there weren’t a whole lot of agencies and programs servicing people with disabilities, and education certainly wasn’t inclusive. Because of the impact Barbara’s unmet needs and behaviors were having on us siblings, my parents made the excruciating decision to institutionalize her at age 7 – that’s the only option they felt they had.
Growing up, on Saturday mornings, when all my school friends go to watch Saturday morning cartoons (back then cartoons were only on Saturday mornings), I would be on the Palisades Parkway, sitting next to my Dad as he drove down to Rockland County to pick up Barbara and bring her home for a couple of hours. I remember, as a young child, 6-7-8 years old, walking into a barrack’s sized, barrack’s style building, where Barbara lived with 70 other children. I was terrified, not just because of the big building, but of the kids I saw. But “wait a minute” you say, “You’re a sibling – you live this- you shouldn’t be scared!” Not So. Disabilities may have been in my family, but as a child, I did not see people with disabilities in my church, in my school or in my community.
As we stood in the foyer of the building waiting for the staff to get Barbara, I watched kids who looked different, spoke differently, moved differently and acted differently.
And then my eyes found my father and I watched him. I watched him…week after week, he would interrupt his conversation with the staff person signing us out, and turn and greet each child who approached him, and he would ask them how they were and he would listen to them, shake their hands and treat them with warmth and respect and dignity.
Dignity – we don’t hear that word much these days. I looked up a definition”
“The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.” There’s nothing in that definition of meeting a standard or fulfilling expectations. It’s having value simply because you exist.
And that’s what my father modeled for me – to treat everyone with dignity.
Thank you Dad for passing on this core value to me. It enriched my relationships and so blessed my life.
The second event occurred as a new employee at Racker.
I was fresh out of grad school and was starting my 9 month clinical fellowship. My supervisor and mentor was Nancy Emerson – many of you know her.
One of the things that Nancy was required to do was to proof my reports. When it was time for me to give her my first progress report on a child I was working with, she said “Double space it.” So I double spaced it and turned it in.
I was not ready for what I got back. I don’t know if any of you are traumatized by a teacher’s red ink pen on a paper you worked so hard on, but this report was full of red ink.
And then I looked at what merited the red ink and I saw a pattern. It was sentences like this:
Jeanette is able to follow 2 step verbal directions. Or this one:
Allysa is able to point to what she wants, but is not able to use spoken words.
Anytime I used the phrases “is able to” or “is not able to” RED INK – right through it!
And then her explanation was a game changer for me.
She said, “You do not know what a child is able to do or not able to do. All you know, is what that child does or does not do in that moment.”
And that was the moment I experienced a huge paradigm shift in my thinking, and I stopped seeing kids as empty buckets that need to be filled, and started seeing them as unique individuals, with God given potential, and my job was to come alongside each one, to build a relationship, to support them, teach some skills, give them some tools, so that they could determine their own dreams and figure out who they were meant to be.
Thank you Nancy for the red ink.
And you know what? This mindset isn’t just applicable for disabilities. It’s for all of us. I don’t know what my husband, daughters, son in law, grandchildren, co-workers, neighbors, etc. Are able to do, but I do know they have potential. Thank you for this award. I’m gonna continue to come alongside whomever God puts in my path, build relationships and give what I have, and good things will happen.
Thank you for your kind attention.
