Beneath the Glass

“Beneath the Glass” was my first published piece about my disability and I published it under a pseudonym.?

The story was about a girl trying desperately to clean her car’s dirty windshield from the inside.?To me, that was the best metaphor for what it feels like to try to heal a chronic illness and also what it feels like to have one.

“I didn’t think much about chronically ill people back then.?I never wondered about their nostalgia for health, that intense pining their imagination could make so palpable.

For?them, life could be this immensely beautiful view through a cracked and clouded windshield; every day spent futilely trying to clean it off from the inside.?Despite the irrefutable knowledge that all that stuff is just out of reach, the thought of doing nothing from the other side of the glass likely felt even more deceptively tragic.

I do that a lot.?I refer to ‘them’ without including myself.?I try to clean the glass from the inside knowing it will never fully penetrate the brown decrepit haze.?I am enlightened enough to know that real acceptance –seeing beauty within the cracks and dirt– is where true healing and happiness will lie for me.?But I cannot escape the fight, the quest to see the entire scene.?Sometimes that makes me feel beautifully hopeful, sometimes that makes me feel like I am wasting what is left.

So maybe my life is just one big hopeful pause.?At least that’s how eight years of treatment feels sometimes, living amidst the extreme pain and lunacy of my own body defying me from every angle.?The only thing that keeps me going is the idea that one day it will stop, and I don’t know if that means gasping my last breath or my first.”

I remember losing out on my first promotion in my career and having my manager at the time tell me, “We cannot give you the job, Lauren, because what if you get sick again?”

That was the moment that I cordoned off my disability from my professional reality, refusing to ever acknowledge or identify with it, because it was a liability.?But that is not the case anymore, and I refuse to let anyone tell me differently.?More importantly, I refuse to allow my silence to reinforce that ideology for anyone else.

My disability may have cost me my first promotion, but it also gave me my first career job and catapulted me to the success that I have now and will continue to have in my future.

Too often we focus on the “dis” in “disability” and we miss all of the absolutely incredible strengths and skills that disability grants us.?For me, my success in sales has been almost completely due to my illness.

In the same way that professional athletes tend to be top performers in their career, so can people with disabilities and here is why:

1.) We both have to have discipline.?For me, this was the discipline to heal.?It was the discipline to juice celery juice every morning for five years, to remove gluten, dairy, soy, meat and every fun food imaginable from my regimen, to stop drinking alcohol.?Day and night, whatever it took I was dedicated and I succeeded.?When my first job required “Boot Camp” and discipline, it was already engrained in me, like muscle memory, I embraced it and knew I had what it took without question.

2.) We both use visualization and gratitude.?When I landed my first #internship, I was honestly just so grateful to be healthy enough to hold a job, let alone graduate college and help my parents pay for my medical bills.?This gratitude forced me to wake up earlier than my peers, leave later, throw myself into everything and anything that was required of my job with excitement and eagerness.?I dressed for the job I wanted, not the role I was in.?I spoke to everyone and anyone who could give me advice and guidance and it created cross-collaboration that put me on the radar of my company’s c-suite.?Within three months of my internship, I was offered a full-time position at the company, in any department that I wanted.

3.) We both have grit and resilience.?When I started to fail in my new sales role, I didn’t falter.?I didn’t give up.?I dug deeper.?I researched behavioral psychology and I knew that the same way I had visualized my healing, I needed to visualize my professional success.?In a job filled with cold-calling and rejection, I needed to apply positive psychology to get my head in the game.?I spent my lunch breaks reading David Hawkins and “The Happiness Advantage.”?I created a “vision board,” and used meditation to help keep me centered.?I used discipline and positivity to help me overcome fear of rejection and better handle people’s objections with optimism and curiosity.?Within several months, I closed my first deal and within the year, I broke the record on most meetings booked for an SDR at my company.

4.) We have emotional intelligence.?Sympathy is the “feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.”?#Compassion is the understanding of other’s suffering.?There is a huge difference between the two and I believe that the key to emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to understand the suffering of others.?Those of us who have struggled through a chronic illness know what it is like to be overlooked, to be given false hope time and time again, to chart through uncertainty, to face death, to question the meaning of life.?We know what it is like when people disappear, because it all becomes too much for too long.?We know what it is like to have an invisible shadow over everything, a shadow many others cannot see.?These challenges allow us to better recognize the pain of others and to provide the care, comfort and the ear that we may not have been given (or maybe we received and it made all of the difference).

5.) We don’t sweat the small stuff.?Facing life and death situations, hospital scares and all of the stresses and anxieties of chronic illness puts things into perspective.?People don’t remember what you did, but how you made them feel.?I’ve learned to understand and accept how fragile equilibrium can be for the body, that what I eat, how much I sleep and the stress that comes into my life impacts my ability to show up for myself and others (personally and professionally).?This means making sacrifices, it means having meals prepared, taking the time to eat lunch, finding time to walk the dog.?I’ve learned that if you don’t put your health first, it will force you to put it first (at the expense of everything else).?I’ve learned to work smarter, not harder, to optimize as much as possible, to be results-oriented.

The workplace is changing and for many of us involved with DE&I, digital transformation and sustainability, we’re seeing that change in real-time.?It isn’t what I imagined growing up: a seamless progression with memorable footnotes.?The road to change is messy, plagued with steps forward, steps backward, tension, passion, discomfort, mistakes, failures and triumphs.?

It feels not too dissimilar to trying to clean a windshield from the inside of the glass, but this time, it feels different.?This time, I’ve finally realized that it CAN be cleaned, just not alone.?With 133 million Americans (40% of our population) suffering from Chronic Illness, we must all level up, be our authentic selves and recognize the infinite wisdom and beauty in our struggles.?Whether you have a disability, chronic illness, terminal illness or you care for someone in any of these categories, and beyond, I see you.?You are powerful, you are not a liability, you are an asset.