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I want to be able to get back to speaking . I haven ' t done it in the last couple of years because of COVID . We are in a pivotal moment because we ' re coming out of COVID . I ' m rethinking business in general about what I want to be doing and what I don ' t want to be doing . It goes back to those buckets of consulting , coaching , writing , speaking , and perhaps other things . It ' s interesting because a lot of the stuff I ' m looking at now is the future of work , how we work and how we reimagine our entire work life .
Q : Mental health continues to be left out of the disability conversation . What are your thoughts on this , and how are you bringing it into the conversation ?
A : Mental health is a nonapparent disability ; you can ' t see it . It ' s a spectrum , and these are issues that people face . This falls under neurodiversity , [ which ] is a large spectrum . Particularly now , in this age of COVID . When people are dealing with this level of uncertainty , what ' s been amplified ? It is our need to understand both mental health and mental fitness . How do we navigate our day-to-day lives ?
What are the things that are barriers in our lives ? How do we deal with those challenges ? If we frame it as part of the larger disability culture , the larger disability narrative , then it becomes something that we can destigmatize and say ; this is part of the human experience .
It ' s part of the human experience ; we can evolve in terms of how we approach it from a needs basis and how we think about the value proposition of a human being because ultimately , what you want is that disabilities , in general , become a descriptor . I ' m African American ; I ' m Latina . And look , those descriptors define lots of things . Ed Roberts , one of the great champions of the
disability civil rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s , talked to a group of black civil rights leaders . They were talking about Rosa Parks and the importance of who should play a role in the movement . Roberts , and I paraphrase , said , ' you wanted to get to the front of the bus ; we want to get on the bus .'
It ' s a fundamental statement that people with disabilities want to participate in society . What are the tools that are needed so that we can be inclusive ? Mental health is one of those areas , and light needs to be shed on it . It needs to be destigmatized and seen as part of the human experience , which is important for the entire disability conversation .