Part Two: What Does Being Sick Look like, Anyways??

While it is not uncommon for people with disabilities, both young and old, to feel misunderstood, how they experience this can take all sorts of forms. In this part, kids look at how their disability is received by both acquaintances and strangers. They protest others' inability to believe them, to understand them, to receive them simply as they are.

9. What Does Being Sick Look like, Anyways??: Based on letters written by Rebecca at age eighteen. Rebecca had had chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS) since she was twelve.
   
   
10. It’s No Big Deal: Features a description by Nathaniel at age five about what it was like for him to live with Apert’s syndrome, the rare condition with which he was born.
    
    
11. I’ve Just Never Felt Beautiful: Laura, who had a bilateral cleft lip and palate, wrote the journal entries included here between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one.
    
    
12. Excuse Me, I’m Deaf!: This is a story Christine Pantapas wrote when she was eighteen about what it was like for her as a person who was Deaf to go out on a Saturday night to a dance club in Boston.
    
    
13. A Child with No Family: Features a song written by three girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. The girls were attending a music therapy program for young people with a range of emotional disabilities, including chronic low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety, and who were considered to be at risk for drug use, teen pregnancy, and antisocial behavior.