- Where do you work?
- I am a freelancer.
I've been working in advertising for a little bit.
- What do you do for a living?
- I am a residential coordinator.
My job is to help people with mental disabilities
maintain a sense of independence
in a workplace and in a neighborhood.
- I work in a home with adults with mental disabilities.
I've also worked as a teacher and with students
with mental disabilities.
- What do you do?
- I teach voice lessons to people
and I music direct children's musicals.
- What's your family like?
- I have a pretty big family.
I'm the youngest.
- My brother was in a motorcycle accident
a month after I graduated high school
and he ended up losing his right arm.
And had a traumatic brain injury.
I never thought about ableism
or being an able-bodied person until this happened.
- I have a disability and throughout my life
I had some insecurities about it,
like how was I supposed to contribute in a world
that I felt like everyone had the same abilities.
And I had different.
- I feel for your brother, you know?
I had one woman, she told me
I shouldn't feel sorry for them.
They don't want that.
They just want you to understand.
- I myself suffer from mental illness in a sense
and I hardly ever talk about it.
It took me years to recover, literally recover my psyche.
- I've been working with people
with disabilities since I was 17.
The things that I've seen,
it made me so much more of an advocate.
- It's weird that growing up,
I feel like my parents were always really fearful
for me getting into adulthood
and I kind of always thought like
why don't you guys think that I have a future?
We live in kind of like a new world.
Now we're talking about it,
now this is like an open thing.
- What do you like about yourself?
- I'm athletic, I mean I work out.
I try to get some cardio in,
and I'm good at it.
- Well, you have that up on me, I hate exercise so much.
I like the kind of exercise where you don't have to think
about the fact that you're exercising.
- I'm saying that you're like 25.
I bet you got like a blue shirt on.
Blue jeans.
I bet you was born in like Chicago.
I bet you are a soprano,
because I know you said you were a singer.
- You are some type of Hispanic background
between five ten and six feet tall.
Around your late thirties.
- I think you are twenty nine.
I think you're wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
I think you're from the East Coast,
maybe like Pennsylvania.
- Maybe mixed? Maybe Asian?
Kind of petite? Short?
I know you give small little hints
of some kind of walking apparatus,
not in a chair though.
I feel like you're pretty young, 19, 20.
- Hey! - Hey!
I was right about a couple things.
- It's so weird having a conversation--
- I visualized you a whole different way.
- Oh really?
Totally different. I thought you had like a blue shirt.
- You got the brown hair.
- I said you were 29.
- Nah.
I'm 23.
- Oh so am I.
You said I was 25.
- I'm from the south.
- Oh.
- I'm from Memphis, Tennessee.
- I'm from San Jose, Silicon Valley.
- Oh, so okay, okay.
- I am German, not Norwegian.
- Hey, so I got Germany right.
- Yeah, like a lot.
You said I was a soprano, I'm not.
- Oh, alto?
- Yeah, low voice.
- Alto, I was a tenor.
- That makes sense.
You sound like a tenor.
- Let's just sing randomly.
- Sure, yeah.
- Let's sing a song.
- Alright, which song?
- What song do you want to sing?
- We'll do that later.
- Hi.
- Nice to finally actually meet you.
- I feel like I know you.
- I did not expect you in a chair,
other than when you gave tiny little hints.
- Mm hm.
- It threw me off for a second
- And I'm actually 29.
- 29? Wow.
I was really off.
- You were right, I actually am Asian,
which no one guesses, so you guessed it without looking.
- In looking now, I was like, I was wrong.
You gave me some inches, I was like sweet, I'll take it.
I think you said five eight, six,
I'm like oh my god, I'm like five seven,
on a good day maybe.
I said short, petite, so I was pretty spot on.
I don't know how tall you would be,
I don't think you would tower over me, right?
- No, five one.
- As we get older, things get harder, right?
I'm just having to come to face with the fact that
oh, I think I'm a little sensitive.
- I think you're too hard on yourself.
I think you just feel things and that's good.
You're like, I'm sensitive.
You're just, you're a person with feelings.
- Fo sho, fo sho.
- I gotta ask you, what's like the toughest challenge,
getting dressed?
Getting to bed?
- No, so I'm actually not confined to the chair.
I can do a little bit of walking.
But I walked a lot as a kid.
And I only started using the wheelchair
when I was in high school.
But I grew up with my parents being fearful of my future.
You know, I don't know how she's going to make it
in the world.
And they would say things to me like
we want to get a house that we can have
an apartment that you can live in,
like a basement apartment.
I'm like, I don't need to live with you.
I can do this on my own.
- Right, right, right.
- It was nice to meet you O'Shay
- It was nice to meet you, too, Carolynn.
- It was nice meeting you.
I honestly had a great experience just talking to you.
- Same.
- I don't know if you're a handshaker or a hugger,
but I'll give you a hug.
- Yeah.
That's just--
- This was awesome.
This was fun.
- Nice to meet you, Albert.
- Likewise.
♪ Soul pancake ♪