By Shreya Shankar, M.Sc. Clinical Psychology, OI Warrior
To be a young person with OI is confusing. It’s confusing to try to experience similar things as your peers while having to Google “can a person with OI do…?” It’s not just confusing, but also scary to navigate the same world in manners others will never fully understand. For someone without OI, a crowded road is a crowded road, for one with OI, it’s practically navigating the moon’s craters. It’s also hard to juggle between exams, education, and friendships while experiencing injuries, surgeries, and painful and exhausting recoveries. But that doesn’t mean we give up, it just means we have to try a little harder to create the life we want, a bit more cautiously. I think what we’d like the world to know is that we’re not to be pitied, stared at, or seen as a “freakshow” diagnosis, we’re more than just a statistic. We want to be seen as more than just what we endure, as what we’re capable of in our own unique ways. We also want inclusion, which calls for better access to public spaces, education, and healthcare. We’re looking and hoping for a world where differences are not barriers but bridges.