By Jessie Paige, Council Member
In March 2025, I spoke at Colorado’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Awareness Day (Youtube) and asked the audience to think about eyeglasses.
I invited everyone who wore glasses or contact lenses to identify themselves. Then I widened the circle: What about people with a family member who wears glasses? A friend? A colleague?
It did not take long before nearly everyone in the room could relate.
Then I asked them to imagine something strange:
What if corrected vision were treated the way many other disabilities are treated?
Imagine going to an eye exam. You put on your glasses, and suddenly you can see clearly. The doctor confirms that the glasses are working exactly as intended.
Then the doctor says, “You’ve been wearing glasses for years. Shouldn’t you be able to see without them by now? Isn’t independence the goal?”
Or perhaps you are told that your vision is impaired, but not impaired enough to qualify for glasses.
Maybe someone else needs glasses more than you do.
Maybe you are told that you are too intelligent to need them.
Maybe you simply need to try harder to see.
The scenarios sound ridiculous.
That is precisely why I find the analogy so useful.
We have normalized one kind of human variation
Variation in human vision is so common that we barely think about it as unusual. Surveys cited by the Federal Trade Commission have found that roughly 61 to 65 percent of U.S. adults wear eyeglasses.
And even for those who do not, it is difficult to imagine someone who does not know or love someone who relies on corrected vision.
We understand that human beings see differently.
We have developed a tool that helps many people compensate for those differences, and for the most part, we do something remarkably uncomplicated about it:
We give people glasses.
We do not assume someone is lazy because they cannot read a street sign without them. We do not question their intelligence. We do not see successful use of glasses as proof that the glasses should be taken away.
We understand that the glasses are part of what makes access possible.
A pair of glasses does not make someone intelligent. It does not teach them to read. It does not give them motivation, creativity, work ethic, or professional skill.
It simply allows them to access abilities they already possess.
That distinction—between capability and access to capability—has stayed with me.
And it has made me wonder why we do not extend the same ordinary acceptance to more forms of human difference.
Disability is part of human life, too
More than one in four adults in the United States has some type of disability.
Some disabilities are present from birth or emerge during childhood. Others develop through illness, injury, changing health, or simply living into older age.
Disability is not an experience confined to a small group at the margins of society. It is woven throughout families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and communities.
It is part of the human condition.
I am writing from the lived experience of raising two autistic children who are very different from one another. They have different strengths, different support needs, and different areas where the world asks more of them.
Raising them has taught me that disability does not always look the way people expect it to look.
For many autistic people, some of the most significant challenges are not immediately visible. They may involve sensory processing—how the brain receives and responds to sound, light, touch, movement, and other sensory information. They may involve communication, particularly when stress or overwhelm makes spoken language harder to access. They may involve executive functioning: the mental processes we use to begin tasks, shift attention, organize information, remember steps, manage time, regulate emotions, and move from one demand to another.
A person can be highly intelligent and still need significant executive-functioning support. Someone can communicate easily in one environment and struggle to access spoken language in another. A person may function independently in one area of life and require substantial support in another.
Support needs can also change across environments and throughout a person’s life.
None of those differences tell us the full story of what someone is capable of.
Yet with many disabilities, we continue to treat the need for support very differently than we treat the need for glasses.
When support becomes something to prove
As a parent navigating disability systems, I have encountered a strange contradiction.
People often have to demonstrate just how poorly they can function without support in order to qualify for it.
Then, if the support works, their success can be used as evidence that perhaps they no longer need it.
I have been told that one of my children was “too bright” to need a particular support. I have also been told that because a child was doing well, it was time to remove supports and encourage greater independence.
But sometimes a person is doing well because the support is working.
We understand this intuitively with glasses.
If a child puts on glasses and can suddenly read the board at school, we do not conclude that their improved performance means the glasses are unnecessary.
The improved performance is evidence that the glasses are doing their job.
Yet in disability services, education, healthcare, employment, and community life, people can find themselves repeatedly having to justify the tools and accommodations that make participation possible.
The underlying message can become difficult to miss:
Needing support is a problem.
And I think that is where we need to talk about shame.
How systems teach shame
No person is born feeling shame.
No child enters the world believing that needing help makes them weak, that being different makes them less worthy, or that support is something they should outgrow in order to prove themselves.
We teach those messages.
They are learned when a person is praised primarily for needing less support. They are learned when independence is treated as the highest form of success, regardless of the cost. They are learned when someone must repeatedly prove their limitations before their needs are believed, or when an accommodation is treated as an advantage rather than as a means of access.
They are also learned when our schools, workplaces, services, and communities are built around one narrow expectation of how a person should move, learn, communicate, work, socialize, or participate.
When that happens, we do more than create practical barriers. We communicate something about whose way of being human is considered acceptable.
A disabled person may begin to understand their need for support as a personal weakness. A child may interpret difficulty functioning in an environment as evidence that something is wrong with them. Families can spend years trying to help someone become better at fitting into a system without ever asking whether the system could become better at accommodating the person.
But if shame is something we teach, it is also something we have the power—and the responsibility—to change.
We can change the messages people receive about disability. We can stop treating support as evidence of failure. We can stop measuring success by how closely someone can approximate a person who does not need the same support.
And we can begin to treat disability, difference, and the need for support as what they have always been: part of being human.
Support can be ordinary
Normalizing disability does not mean pretending disability never creates difficulty.
It does.
People may experience real barriers, pain, communication differences, sensory challenges, mobility limitations, executive-functioning difficulties, health concerns, or significant support needs.
Acknowledging disability as part of human variation does not require us to minimize any of that.
It asks us to separate needing support from being less valuable.
It asks us to stop assuming that the most successful disabled person is the one whose disability becomes least visible to everyone else.
And it asks us to become more curious about what makes participation possible.
Sometimes that may be assistive technology. Sometimes it is a communication device, a wheelchair, extra processing time, sensory support, a predictable routine, help organizing tasks, accessible transportation, or another person providing assistance.
And sometimes it is a pair of glasses.
The particular support matters less than the principle behind it:
People deserve access to the tools and conditions that allow them to use their own capabilities.
Widening our understanding of being human
Human beings vary in countless ways.
We differ in how we see, move, communicate, learn, organize information, process sensory input, respond to demands, relate to one another, and experience the world.
Some forms of variation have become so ordinary to us that we barely notice the accommodation anymore.
Eyeglasses are one example.
I keep wondering what would change if we extended that same ordinary acceptance to more forms of disability.
What if someone could say, “This is what I need,” without feeling that they first had to demonstrate how badly they could function without it?
What if successful use of a support were understood as evidence that something is working rather than evidence that the support should disappear?
What if receiving help did not carry an expectation that the ultimate goal must always be to stop needing help?
And what if disability itself did not carry shame?
For me, that is one of the most important changes I hope to help create.
I want my children—and other people with disabilities—to know that needing support does not diminish who they are.
Their differences are not evidence that they have failed at being human.
They are part of being human.
The goal of wearing glasses is not eventually to stop needing them.
The goal is to see.
And perhaps the goal of disability support should be understood just as simply: not to make disability or support disappear, but to give people meaningful access to their own lives—to learn, work, communicate, contribute, build relationships, participate in their communities, and belong.
Maybe a more inclusive society begins there.
Not by asking people to become less different, but by widening our understanding of what it means to be human—and letting go of the shame we have attached to the differences that were always part of us.
