Title:
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Tiffany Yu’s Exclusive

Subtitle:
Disability Pride Month Celebration | Climbing New Heights in Community and Advocacy

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.

Let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia Anderson today. We are kicking off disability pride month with a total bang with someone who has made her career, her mission, her movement, her many mic drop, moments in the disability advocacy space.

She’s the brilliant mind behind Diversability. She’s a three time TEDx speaker. She’s a fierce community builder. She is the author of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto. Congratulations on that. She’s also a para climber and I can’t wait to chat about that as well.

Tiffany Yu, I’m sure everybody knows that it’s you at this point with that introduction, but thank you so much. Welcome to the show. So good to see you.

Tiffany Yu: Thanks for having me.

Alycia Anderson: I’m so excited. Happy Disability Pride month.

Tiffany Yu: Yes, and this is a, it’s a milestone year for the Americans with Disabilities Act turning 35, so hopefully. All of our listeners are celebrating in one way or another.

Alycia Anderson: Very good note on that as well. Let’s start with before we dive into your background and all of the goodness, since we’re kind of kicking off with disability pride month, can we talk about it just for a quick sec?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: What does disability pride mean to you? And I’m sure that you’ve been asked that question a million times, but what does it mean to you today, in this moment as we kick off the month?

Not just publicly, but also personally as well?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. You know, and what’s interesting is I actually don’t think there’s a definition of disability pride. I tried doing research on this for the book, but my definition of disability pride is asserting our worth and value in a society that tells us that we should feel shame about who we are or devalues us in one way or another. And in some ways. Less less pc. It’s kind of like a middle finger to, to a middle finger, to ableism,

Alycia Anderson: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany Yu: Hey, I’m whole, I’m valuable. I’m worthy simply by existing.

Alycia Anderson: It’s a middle finger to ableism and it’s also a realignment and education to the world, you know? ’cause I, I’m sure people say this to you, they’re like. Well, why are you proud? Like why are you celebrating that? So I think that that’s a really great way to articulate what Disability Pride is.

And so I appreciate you diving into that a little bit as we’re opening the floodgates to the celebrations this month of Disability Pride and the anniversary of ADA. Can we rewind for a minute and look back? At Little Tiffany. Cute, little sweet. Tiffany, can we look back at your life, your story, where it all began, and I guess the moment that along the way that you decided that it was time to kind of share who you are?

Tiffany Yu: So my passion for this space comes based on my lived experience at the age of nine on a car ride home with my dad and a couple of my siblings, he lost control of the car. He unfortunately passed away and I acquired a handful of disabilities and injuries, including permanently paralyzing one of my arms. I broke a couple bones in one of my legs, so I was a temporary wheelchair user for about four months, and then much later I’d be diagnosed with PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a type of mental health disability. I wanna share that probably for the first decade plus after I became disabled, I had internalized a lot of negative messages around what it meant to exist in a disabled body, or exist in a disabled mind, and what I had internalized was that not only should I hide those parts of myself, I should try to assert or try to present as non-disabled. And actually in a lot of these conversations, one memory I have is I used to shake people’s hands with my right hand, which is my paralyzed arm, and I have no grip in my hand.

And so I, there was some shift, I wanna say probably when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. When I maybe realized that trying to shake my hand, shake people’s hands the same way as everyone else, I put that in quotes, it was not how I wanted to represent myself and the right-handed handshake. The paralyzed arm handshake was not who I felt like I was, so I shifted to become a very confident left-handed handshaker. And so to your second question around kind of that turning point, I believe that some people in the disability community have what I call a second disability origin story. So the car accident was my first origin story. My second disability origin story is whatever that story is, or that moment in time, or even that long period where a disabled person decides to take pride ownership, and even at a baseline level acceptance of a disability identity. Even just acknowledging that your disability does impact the way that you navigate the world, or that you have experienced ableism. And I will say that not all disabled people will reach that second disability origin story. I’m sure you have met many disabled people who do not identify as such, whomaybe harbor a lot of that internalized ableism to not ask for the things that they need. And so my second story came around my senior year of university. At this point in time, I had been in this disabled body for 12 years, and there were a couple things that happened. You’ll read about all of them in the introduction of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, but the first was I had finished the summer internship at Goldman Sachs and while I was there, I got introduced to these communities they have for employees from, different historically excluded communities.

So I was part of their women’s employee resource group. They had one for Asian employees and they also had one for disabled employees and the people who support us. And that was the first time I had seen a disability community. And here I was getting to network and build my community at this firm outside of my direct group, my direct department. And I was meeting senior people who were the scariest to me at the time, who now became my mentors and sponsors, and really wanted me to succeed at this firm. So when I came back from that internship, I started to really think more about how I felt like all of us need community period, but those of us who had disabilities, who felt so isolated and alone in our experiences, what if we had access to community too? And that became my second disability origin story and the beginning of my journey to exploring what disability pride looked like for me.

Alycia Anderson: I love that your platform has a big component of community. I think that is a really, really important lesson, not just for disabled people, but like for society in general to kind of come together with the ones around you and because they help you understand yourself. And I’ve had those same experiences in my own life where honestly I’ve rejected my community in the past when I was younger, and had internalized ableism and was so afraid to be that person.

It’s taken me a long time to have my shift in acceptance of who I am, and like, can you talk about community a little bit and how important that has been like in your path, but also what you’ve seen like externally.

Tiffany Yu: I think one of the many lessons that we have learned during the pandemic is the importance of community and connection and healthy relationships. And the World Health Organization talks about how our overall wellbeing is this intersection of our mental health, our physical health, and our social health. Social health meaning, relationships, community connection, and I think that honestly the World Health Organization has had it defined, has had our overall wellbeing and wellness defined that way for a long time. But I don’t think it was elevated to the consciousness until we were all, many of us were socially isolated and quarantined in our homes where we had to think about not only creative ways that we could builds and continue to have that connection, but leveraged, technology in that way too. So the definition of community that I use is when a group of people come together to nurture your own growth in each other’s growth. So, community to me is all about growing together, and I have one through line of my work where I say that I’m building the things that I wish would’ve existed when I was younger. And I went to a camp for people who have brachial plexus injuries. That’s the name of my paralyzed arm. I went for the first time only a couple of years ago, I think in 2022 was the first time the nonprofit had been around since 1997. But here I was, they called us the injured adults and then you had the injured kids. So my injury can happen in traumatic events like were called the traumatics as well. Uh, it’s a traumatic brachial plexus injury that’s a formal name. Can happen in different accidents throughout your lifetime. Or it can also happen unfortunately, due to medical malpractice during childbirth if the person pulls the arm out first. So you have a lot of kids who have brachial plexus injuries since birth. And it’s not a birth disability. It’s, as they were coming out, it happens due to malpractice. And so, I saw all these kids who are running around with other kids who have arms, who work differently, and I just remember thinking about how much I wish I would’ve known that a camp like that existed. And it did. I just wasn’t aware of it for 9-year-old Tiffany, and 9-year-old Tiffany, is this why behind all of my work? Because she was so alone and my relationship with community actually started with a Taiwanese American with my Taiwanese American identity, and I actually didn’t identify as Asian or Taiwanese until I was 18. Part of it was growing up as one of the only Asian families in my neighborhood, so there wasn’t really a space to talk about that aspect of myself, and when I went to college, I met another student, her name’s Jackie, and she told me that her mom is from Taiwan. And I said, oh, my dad’s from Taiwan. We should start a club. And I said that like as a joke, but she took it and she ran with it. And we became the co-founders of Georgetown’s first ever Taiwanese American student club. And it was through this Taiwanese American club that I developed a sense of identity, pride, culture, learned more about the history. I wrote one of my, university thesis, I wrote my university thesis on Taiwan. And I developed so much pride and I wish my dad could have seen that. I wish he could have seen, ‘ cause my dad was from Taiwan and my mom is a refugee from Vietnam, but he never got to see me be proud of where he came from. But I fast forward that, you know, you asked this question about my relationship with the communities. Was that I realized that community had this power, as you said, for us to discover more about who we are, but also realized we’re not alone in our experience. And that’s actually where I think we build solidarity and we gain power and influence together as a collective. So then fast forward as very actively involved in the Taiwanese American Club and essentially I knew how to start a club. So coming back from the Goldman internship. I actually told Jackie, who was my roommate, then I said, Jackie, I think I’m gonna start a disability club.

Exactly like we did with the Taiwanese American Club. We’re, I’m gonna do this with the disability club. And she was like, you should totally do it, and I will happily be your first member. And I will say this was the beginning of Diversability at Georgetown, which was. Georgetown’s first ever disability student club, and my first members were all my Taiwanese American peers. They actually developed, my little buddy, my Taiwanese American little buddy. We had like a little buddy system or a buddy system where I was a big buddy. And then you had a freshman or a sophomore who was a little buddy. He created Diversability’s logo for our first 11 years and so for me, in some ways I saw myself as a community and I still see myself as a community person first and an advocate second, because I actually didn’t see myself as a disability advocate until well after Diverseability had started growing our community and hosting events.

Alycia Anderson: Incredible. number one, congratulations on the work that you’ve done and are doing with Diversability and beyond. It’s substantial. It’s, a beacon. It’s something for all of us to follow. You’re doing such amazing work within that advocacy. You’re one of the boldest, clearest voices of disability, advocacy, justice, like all of it.

Andnumber one, thank you for all of the years of work that you’ve been putting into that advocacy for all of us. What’s something that people don’t see behind the scenes in the work that you’re doing that you can share with us. I know you are really busy and you wear a lot of hats.

Can you share any of that?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah, I will say how much I rest.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, I love that you just shared that.

Tiffany Yu: While I also work from my bed desk, but but now I’m trying to create more separation. But I think I will say in the early days of Diversability, I think I became, so Diversability existed at Georgetown from 2009 until 2014. In 2015, I was still a young professional at the time and I was like, where is the group of disabled, young professionals meeting?

Like, where are they hanging out? And so I decided to grow Diversability outside of the university environment at that point in time. And in the beginning, I wanna say I was pouring from an empty cup. I felt like I was overly available for anyone. And when you decide you want to build a community, you also have to make space for everything people are bringing into that community as well.

And I don’t know if I had the emotional capacity for myself, but I was pushing that to the wayside to make space for other people. I don’t know when the turning point was. Maybe 2017 timeframe. Where I said if I’m gonna be sustainable in this work, where I think we have placed too much, we have glorified productivity and hustle culture. And I actually don’t use the word busy to describe myself. I use the word full. I mean we, it’s all the same thing, but language, you know, language matters.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. Yeah.

Tiffany Yu: I remember I have this early memory of working in banking. Which that I would say everyone is really busy. You know, you’re working very demanding hours. And I remember like asking someone else like, Hey, how’s everything going? And they were like, oh my gosh, I’m so busy. And when they said that, I was like, what do you think I’m doing? Because it was, it was known that if you were working in that industry, it was always demanding. You’re working nights, weekends, sometimes pulling all-nighters. Like it was just, too much. So I kind of moved away from busy because I guess I worked in an industry where it was like the busy Olympics or the busy Paralympics and I just didn’t wanna participate in that. And I took a step back and I said, you know, my sustainability in this work means I have to figure out ways to fill my cup and I found rest the best way to do that. And there’s actually a TED talk out and it talks about how there are seven types of rest and you know, physical rest, sleep is probably the one we think about the most, but there’s also like social, rest and creative rest. And, I bring that up because I feel like there are many of us who are getting enough sleep but do not feel well rested, and so we also have to figure out how to find ways to do that. But yeah, part of that is I will only schedule meetings on certain days of the week and part of why I moved to Los Angeles is I feel like it’s a really fun playground here. I used to live in the Bay Area, and while I loved living there and I found, that is where I found my voice, I really found my voice stronger as an advocate.

I felt like I woke up and I like went to a council meeting and then I sat in on a committee meeting and then I was like on this other council and then I hung out. Everything was advocacy related because it’s just so rich there.

But I moved to LA ’cause now, I can wear like my fancy maxi dresses and I make this joke that I have an LA hat. But I just wanted to find ways to have more play. I call it PFJ, play fun, joy.

So yeah. I think the parts you don’t see are, I feel like I’m like more fun and goofy and ridiculous than most people see online or when they think about me. And I’m trying to find ways to incorporate that more into some of my, whether it’s social media content or just like in how I present myself, but yeah, I think it’s just having that balance of, okay, am I getting enough rest? Am I having enough PFJ enough play fun, joy in my life? And is that enabling me to make space for the work and the impact that I wanna have in the world?

Alycia Anderson: I think that PFJ has really been coming through on your social media specifically lately. Now that you, like, I’ve been really, I always enjoy following you, but I do think that there’s been like a more playful tone. So, and I didn’t know that I was recognizing that until you said it right now, but it’s definitely coming through.

I love that.

Tiffany Yu: And actually that, is something I’ve been noticing that’s been happening kind of in like the disabled creator spaces is some of us are like, we noticed that we. That we get higher engagement when we’re sharing our pain. You know, some people will call this like trauma exploitation when we’re sharing like the hard parts, and that’s important too, but like, can we make more space for disabled joy? And, actually when I saw that conversation happening online, maybe that’s what you’ve been noticing. I started to look at my own platform and I said, oh, it’s advocacy, advocacy. Like I love taking photos. And I actually, that’s something my dad loved doing and I’ve been trying to connect the dots in a lot of ways of like him, younger me, who I am now. And so then it was like I take a bajillion photos and I get so much joy out of them. How can I share them? Even though there’s no direct purpose per se, other than just showcasing the wholeness of who we are. Right. And maybe that’s the point.

Alycia Anderson: Totally. I agree a hundred percent. And I need that in my own platform as well, even more. And I think it’s, your audience wants to see that full holistic view of who you are. For sure. So I love it that you’re focused on that. That’s beautiful.

Tiffany Yu: Yeah. I did post something a couple years ago where I was like, hey you know, do you think I should create a separate account? That’s more kind of like the personal updates. And keep this like an advocacy type platform. And the majority of people were like, Hey, we’re here for all of it.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I totally agree with that. And then the only hard part of that is it’s just so much, so.

Tiffany Yu: I’ll say one, one of the boundaries I did set was what are the things that are gonna be just for me? And I think I determined two things. I’ll probably add more to the list and it’ll oscillate. But one was, and I think about this timeframe where I felt like I was oversharing and not leading with vulnerability.

And I do think there’s a distinction between that. Where oversharing to me is looking for something in return, like not sharing something from like a fully embodied like wholehearted place. So I was sharing like, yeah, people just knew, everything. I mean, they knew when I had a yeast infection, you know, if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna go there. And so, uh, and you laugh, but actually there’s a whole series and I thought about like, should I make this private? And I was like at that point in time, that’s what I thought that I wanted to share. And that’s, you know, part of the journey. There it is. But but yeah, I think for me, like my health, I think I just wanna keep between me and mymedical team and also just things about my romantic relationships for now can be just me. And so, so yeah, I think it’s also fun to just have a couple things, like we are people who live chronically online. Our lives are online as well. I do wanna make the wholeness of ourselves accessible to other people, but I also think it’s totally fine to just have things that are just for you.

And before we started recording, we were talking about para climbing. And for a lot of people, that’s a new thing that they’re hearing about me because I haven’t posted as much about it, because for a while I just wanted it to be for me. But now you’re getting, a couple little teases here and there.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, and those teases are part of the like fun and joy, you can see how it lights you up. Let’s talk about it for a minute. You brought it up. So let’s talk about para climbing. I came to your book signing in Sacramento, and I feel like it was one of the first things that you literally we’re talking about like ranking up on the leaderboard and all of the things that you’re accomplishing.

Let’s talk about the para climbing.

Tiffany Yu: Para climbing or climbing rock Climbing. This top rope climbing. So like at a climbing gym. Rock climbing is something I have vivid memories of during my pre disabled times. Mainly friends’ birthday parties. I don’t think I was doing it seriously and after became disabled, I had internalized the harmful messaging that you couldn’t be in a disabled body and be active. So I essentially sat out of any physical activity for almost 20 years after became disabled.

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

Tiffany Yu: if you’ve watched one of my TED Talks is called The Power of Exclusion was really about how there was no effort made to try and make my mandatory gym class more accessible for me. And I know you studied this in your education, and I’m so grateful that that is being offered now. But I hear you have two narratives around physical activity in a disabled body. You have the people who, maybe their families were encouraging of. It, helped them find the beauty of sport and team sports as a way to build character and confidence in your disabled body. And then you had those of us who didn’t have the resources. Or support to know what was available and essentially felt even more isolated and excluded and alone in our bodies and I was the latter of those two. So in 2016, because I had created Diversability, and I’d like to describe us as like a virtual town square and you go to the town square and you’ve got all different types of people there sharing all different things that they’re working on.

Maybe someone’s sharing a podcast, maybe someone’s talking about their nonprofit, maybe someone’s looking for some support. But there was someone who joined Diversability. Her, her name is Karima Bats, and she runs a nonprofit called the Adaptive Climbing Group.

I would’ve never joined a group that was about adaptive sports.

But since she joined this Diverseability town square, she shared about her nonprofit. And I remember commenting or saying something like, oh, I, I loved climbing before I became disabled. Like, you can climb in if you have all different types of disabilities. And she was like, why don’t you come out climbing sometime? And it was in Brooklyn and I was living in Manhattan at the time. So I went out and one of my friends came with me and I remember, getting my belay on, and this is 2016 and the car accident was in 1997. So this is 19 years later, and I am standing in front of the wall and I turn back to the person who is my belay, and I go, I can’t. He goes, you can. And so then I’m take a deep breath and I start climbing, and about halfway up I go, I’m tired. I can’t. He goes, take a break and then keep going. And then I made it to the top. And I just thought about even the mindset that I had, the words that were coming outta my mouth were all, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

Because I, I’d internalized so much messaging in those 20 years that this was not for me. Now here I was surrounded by so many other disabled bodies climbing this wall, so that planted a seed. I didn’t really do much with it until I went to Paris for the Paralympics, and that was actually my first time attending any Olympic or Paralympic games. And I not only have become friends with some Paralympians over the years, which is very cool to that, I can now call them my friends. But I just saw the energy and the electricity around the Paralympic movement. And one of the things I had learned was that para climbing is actually gonna be one of the new sports for LA 2028, which is not the reason why or could be maybe. So at this Paris Paralympics. I thought about, I had just finished my first triathlon and I actually have my little cup here. I guess you can’t see it, but It says age group winner. I actually won my category. Albeit I was one of one I was like in a disabled female age group class, which is the only one.

But I had like done this triathlon. I had done my first 20 mile bike ride. I was like getting back into exploring what this disabled body could do. And so here I was at the Paralympics. I watched wheelchair tennis. I saw wheelchair rugby. Para athletics, you know, all these different sports. And, actually maybe this is the point of the Paralympic movement is to inspire people to try sport. So I said what’s a sport I can try? And when I got back to Los Angeles, there was like a little disability pride fair that was happening in October, and there was a climbing wall there. And one of the guys who, was from, who had helped set up the climbing wall, I told him. totally offhand, I said, I think I wanna start para climbing. And he is like, oh, you totally should. And he gave me his postcard and then he did research and told me about all of the para climbing clinics, all of the adaptive climbing clinics that were happening in LA because I knew the one that was happening in New York area, but I wasn’t connected and so in December of 2024. I remember being like, okay, this is the one that’s the closest to me. Their email doesn’t work. I’ve tried DMing them and this guy called the gym to make sure that they were still running their clinic so I could go. But here I was again coming up with all these reasons why I wasn’t gonna climb, and this is probably more information that you’d like.

But in January I started climbing more regularly and I found out that there was a national championships that was gonna be happening at the end of February, and it was in San Francisco. It was in Oakland. I was like, LA to San Francisco is an easy trip. Maybe, I should just go. But literally up until a week before the championship, I was like, I’m not ready. But I was like, it’s close enough that I should just go. So, I went and I climbed and I came in seventh. I actually tied for seventh in my category. but I did a lot better than I thought I would do, and I’m glad I showed up and the top 10 make it onto the team. So, I started getting emails being like, congrats. Uh, you’re now on the USA Para Climbing National Team. I’m on what’s called the National Development Team. And I responded to the email and I said, Hey. just wanna double check that I am supposed to be getting these emails. I like tied for seventh and then she sent me the wording that said like the top 10, make it on team.

So then I was like. I made it onto the team. And then the next thing that kind of comes up in para climbing are these world cups or these, international competitions and they let the top five go. So, there was one in Salt Lake City that happened a couple weeks ago that I didn’t make the cutoff for but there is one happening in Austria. And two, two people in the top five couldn’t make it. So that meant that I could go.

Alycia Anderson: Oh my God, Are you going to Austria?

Tiffany Yu: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: That’s incredible.

Tiffany Yu: So I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go and

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

Tiffany Yu: I’m trying to maintain positive, but can I tell you something that I’ve learned about myself? I’ve learned that as someone who has experienced trauma, I am actively working on healing and unlearning this negative self narrative and self-talk that I have, and it’s so deep. And in 2020, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. And the the group that I climbed with, they were like, okay, we have these rules and the number one rule is to stay positive, and I will share in full transparency, I did not follow that rule. I was complaining the whole time, but I still made it to the summit.

And so one thing I learned about myself is that, yes, Tiffany, I may have this negativity, I may be complaining, but I still take action. And I even think about the process of writing this book. I was like no one is gonna care about this. It’s not gonna do well, blah, blah. But I still wrote the book, and so coming into this competition, I’m like, I’m at a disadvantage in this category. I’m the only one arm climber on my team, but I’m still gonna show up and I’m still gonna try because I’m anchoring to past versions of myself. And in a lot of ways, to me, climbing was never necessarily about the competition. It was about having fun and it was about reconnecting with pre disabled Tiffany and finding the things that she loved and doing them in my own way,

Alycia Anderson: Ugh. I love it. I love it so much. I’m so happy for you. That is incredible. Wow.

Tiffany Yu: I think part of this journey for me has always been, I not only had a narrative that I was not an athlete for a long time, then I started getting more active in different fitness activities, and then I called myself an unlikely athlete, and I just wanna share that no matter and I have friends who call themselves average athletes, you know, and, and they still compete in the triathlons and they’re still showing up. It’s find the thing that you love, that works with, that works for your body. Find joy in that. Maybe you’re the unlikely athlete, maybe you’re the average athlete, which I very much still feel like I’m in because I want, I guess this is me drinking, that colored juice to just say that sometimes you meet people who are so into their sports that it feels inaccessible for you.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Tiffany Yu: And this is, and actually one of the book events that I did do was with some other athletes to talk about ways that we could better inform coaches and gyms about how to make their spaces better and can I share like the three things that I shared in that talk that worked for me.

Alycia Anderson: Yes, please.

Tiffany Yu: One was I love that they had, and even for my current climbing gym, I love that they have set aside time for adaptive athletes because I know I’m showing up in a space where I have what I, what Mia Mingus calls Access intimacy. I don’t have to ask for permission to show up there. All of our bodies work in different ways, and there are volunteers, or actually there are staff there who are willing, who have dedicated that time for us to try out these different things. The second thing is patience, is that like even with that first time of Tiffany going up on the wall, the amount of times she just wanted to give up, but the fact that they just let me try meant that I topped the climb, here I am kicking and screaming my whole way up. But like just a little bit of patience and then if I really think I can’t do it, you know, having that open communication. And then the third was I got introduced to HIT high intensity interval training.

The trainer, it was a small group, maybe five of us. But this was mixed, you know, disabled and non-disabled people. But he worked with me to adapt. All movements to me. And even if I go back and I watch them, he’s adapting for people of all different body types.

Maybe you’re in a, larger body, and he is like, if you can’t do the knee high runs or whatever, you can just march it out. And the fact that he gave different options for how you can show up means that I can try in different ways. So that’s kind of what I took away from that because I don’t know if I would’ve just showed up at a climbing gym without them knowing that I was coming. And I do share this, story in the book where all of my friends were going to a pottery class and I really want to try pottery. And I messaged my friend and I said, Hey, do you know if they can accommodate someone who can only use one arm? ’cause I think it was the spinny wheel type of pottery class.

And they said, oh, I’m not sure. So I reached out to the pottery, studio and I didn’t hear back from them. So I decided not to go right, to not make things weird for my friends. But what that counted me out of was building relationships with my friends. And I still wanna try a pottery class, like I know I can figure it out, but it’s like being able to have that open communication with a new activity to figure out the ways that it can work for me.

Alycia Anderson: I love that. There was so much in all of everything that you just said, and I think like from the component of being the average person in the room, whether it’s sports or pottery or whatever it might be. Like what I have found too in my life is that I was never the Paralympian either, but going through those lessons, were foundational for growth, foundational, for so many reasons.

So I think the one thing about being the top, being the best, having that goal so lofty that you feel like you can’t reach it. Sometimes it’s a blocker. So I think you saying you do it anyways. ’cause that’s not the actual point. The point is to grow from the experiences, which is what happens.

It’s happened to me too in my life. So that was so beautifully said. I love it.

Tiffany Yu: I like to use the word awe, AWE. When I look back at I guess this journey that I’ve been on in this disabled body for almost 28 years, but there’s awe because I can’t believe that I’m on the team. That was the first awe. And then the second awe was I can’t believe I actually get to go to the competition, and how exciting is it to get to climb?

This one isn’t like entirely made for me, but to get to climb on a route, a competitive route that is designed for your body,

Alycia Anderson: That is designed with your disability in mind, that’s so cool.

I’m so happy for you. You’re so cool. It’s, I can’t wait to see what happens. Okay. We need to talk about the book. Let’s talk about your book, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto. Share it.

Tiffany Yu: So The Anti-Ablesit Manifesto is in response to a question I have received and probably you have received, which is, how can I show up better for the disability community? I will share, probably this is aligned with. You and me. I Really believe in the business of disability inclusion. I think we have spent a long time talking about the moral imperative and the human rights and civil rights case for it.

And those still exist and they’re still very loud and we now have research available that highlights the economic imperative, the business case for disability inclusion. And so I wrote this book, in response to the question, how can I show up better for the disability community? Whether you are a business person or an individual or someone who, again, just wants to show it better for the community. The book is structured in a format called, me, we, us, which is a social impact framework that I learned about 10 years ago about how we can create transformative change. So, no matter where you are in your learning journey, I hope that this book can meet you where you are and hopefully take you to learn something new or figure out better ways that you can advocate. And then at the end of the book, you get introduced to The Anti-Ableist Manifesto Art, which is a piece of art that has about 30 statements on it, displayed indifferent block letters that ranges from things like disability is not a bad word or a bad thing. Educate yourself, use your privilege, hire us. And every statement on the manifesto, art actually corresponds with the chapter in the book. So if you are like, oh my gosh, I feel so intimidated by reading an entire book, you can engage with a piece of art that has 30 statements on it, and maybe there’s one statement or a couple statements on there that resonate with you, and that can be your entrance into this work.

Alycia Anderson: I love that you framed it like that. It’s very for lack of better terms, user friendly, adaptable, you can pick from the card where you wanna go. So it’s really beautiful the way you created your book.

Tiffany Yu: and, and I thought it, I thought it, I try to be like really intentional and thoughtful about how we approach these things, and so I know everyone can engage with a piece of art.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Tiffany Yu: Some reaction to it. Negative, positive, neutral, you know, and that can be even the beginning of that journey of inquiry, that journey of self-reflection too.

Alycia Anderson: We’re gonna put in the show notes how to buy your book, get engaged with what’s the North Star here with the book.

Tiffany Yu: Ooh. Before the book came out, I thought about what, why I wanted to write this book and what purpose I wanted it to serve. And in some ways I feel like this book is my legacy. I’m still active, I’m still around. I’ll still be around, but I thought about, this book is my whole brain in a book.

It’s if you wanted a one-on-one with me, if you have engaged with anything on social media or any of my writing or posts, this is a deep dive. And then I thought about other goal was, you know, not only legacy, but like, how can we scale our work?

You and I are two people. Everyone. We’re not gonna meet everyone.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah,

Tiffany Yu: This book now has the potential to reach people we may never meet. , The book was, let’s scale these messages. And yeah, how can we reach, more people? And, I will say one of the responses I’ve gotten on the book, and actually two things.

So you came to my Sacramento event, there was someone there who is a book lover who talked about wanting to attend more book festivals, and I don’t know if you’ve been following her, but she just recently announced that she and one of her disabled friends are are teaming up together to help improve the accessibility at like the different book events that they go to,

Alycia Anderson: I love it.

Tiffany Yu: And, and that’s. I don’t know. That feels like some seed planted that has now turned into action. Right. And I talk a lot about your spheres of influence, the places you are already going and seeing how you can make an impact in those spaces. One other response I got, they sent me a note and they said, my therapist and I thank you for this book because we’re actually working through the reflection questions together.

And this sounds like someone who is newer on their disability journey and maybe working to unlearn their own internalized ableism.

Alycia Anderson: The book is beautiful, I think those goals for it absolutely makes sense. You need to, we need to scale, and reach more people in an efficient and effective way.

And it’s so well done. So congratulations. Like everybody who’s listening to this go by the book. If you haven’t, it’s very good. Congratulations.

Tiffany Yu: Thank you.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Tiffany Yu: I’m excited, for your future book and in a lot of ways, if I take a step back and I look at this through the lens of community, I guess I’m just hoping that this book and my work play a small part in not only more people feeling proud of who they are and finding themselves, but other people being a part of this history of paving the way for more disabled authors to get their books and their stories out into the world too.

Alycia Anderson: I love that. I’m gonna leave all of your information, how to buy your book, links to everything, all your social media everybody can follow. As we wrap up, can you share a pushing forward moment with our community?

A little mantra or something that you live by?

Tiffany Yu: Ooh. Uh, the quote I really like is if you’re both terrified and excited, then you should definitely do it.

Alycia Anderson: Oh I love it. Tiffany, thank you so much for everything that you do have done and will continue to do. You’re such a powerful force in the movement and way beyond. Like just such an amazing woman. So just congratulations, thank you for everything that you’re doing, and thank you for carving a piece of time and space with me today.

It was so wonderful for me. I really appreciate it a lot.

Tiffany Yu: Oh Thank you, and thank you for everything you’re doing too.

Alycia Anderson: Thank you so much and thank you to our community. I know you enjoyed this one today. Happy disability pride month. Go out there, do your part, whatever that looks like, and we will see you next week for another episode.

This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Tiffany, and that is how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next week.