Transcripts of Andy Imparato.2

If you have a question ever, jump in. I do, I have a question about expectations. Because you mentioned expectations earlier and I just did another interview where a person talked about the expectations of teachers, especially vis-a-vis perceived disability, or disability. So can you talk a little bit about that? How your teachers expected you to behave, and what you think was the ramification of that expectation? Sure, I was the youngest child in my family, and my brother, I had a half-brother and a half-sister who were significantly older, and then I had a brother. So my father was married before he was married to my mother. And my brother Walter had undiagnosed learning disabilities and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and I think school always came kind of difficult to him. He never kind of thought of himself as a strong student. And then he got into football, and football was where his self esteem came from, he was a very good football player. He wasn't really big, but he was very quick, and he was able to make the varsity, and he ended up walking on at the University of Nebraska. So I was kind of viewed in my family as the one who was more academically oriented. But when I first started school... So that happened later. When I was born I know my father thought I was slow, he referred to me as slow, just as a developing child. And part of that is because people in my family, they all I think have Attention Deficit at some level. 

I just have a family where everybody is a star, everybody's brain is moving very fast, and so if your brain is moving kind of normal speed, that's viewed as slow, you know, in some environments. So anyways, my father at my Yale graduation, he teased me for thinking I was slow when I was a toddler. But I remember when I first started school... You got "Yes's" and "No's" in Kindergarten. I got all no's. And I think part of it was my behavioral stuff was not where it needed to be, and I was getting in fights with kids, part of that was my brother would pick on me or would fight with me and then I would kind of take it out on my classmates. But it took me a while, I remember like through 2nd grade, there was one other boy in 2nd grade, if you got in a fight he'd punch you in the face, and everybody else pretty much stayed away from that. So I would do the same thing, so he and I fought with each other, as most people wouldn't want to have that kind of a fight. So I just remember I got taken to the principal for throwing rocks at cars, I mean I was just, I was not in good control of my behavior. And then somehow in 5th grade, it was a transition year for me. 

Where I just started to kind of take school more seriously, and my mother remembers me kind of telling her, in one of our one on one conversations that "I'm ready to kind of start to do better in school" And I don't necessarily remember all the reasons, but I think part of it was having good teachers and getting good feedback. As you get feedback from teachers and from your peers, after a while, you start to think of yourself as a brain and other people start to think of you that way. But it certainly was an evolution for me in Elementary School, and by the time I got to High School, I was taking all honors classes and AP classes, but I was also playing football, so that was fun too. I had my football friends, many of whom ended up having disabilities, and I had my kind of honors class friends. And I really liked that I had both, that I wasn't just with the cerebral crowd all the time. Can I get you to say a few words about, specifically about the impact of disability. You kind of already... But I guess I want to think about it both in terms of content, how the content of writing and speaking about disability has impacted your literacy skills and development. But then also the form, because you've mentioned the impact of your own disability, but I'm thinking about it in those ways, both how it works as a subject matter of things that you work in, but also the process of literacy. 

I think because my disability is to some degree about energy, I've learned kind of that I derive energy from people generally. And not from books. So when I have my high energy, I thrive on interactions with other humans. And when I have my low energy, I'm kind of embarrassed that I don't have more, so I kind of avoid human contact. But in neither state do I crave literature or reading. So I play World of Warcraft when I'm depressed. Especially it's very, it attracts my attention and keeps it, and it's very hard for me to think about work when I'm playing that game. I don't know if you know the game, but you're in an environment online with like 9 other people, and your character has a specific role, and if you like take a phone call or do something else, all 9 other people die. So it's kind of, it's a kind of command-performance environment. So I like that because it really helps me block out work. And when I'm depressed, thinking about work when I'm not at work can be depressing because I have a long list of all the things that I haven't done. And there's always more to do. So I guess, for me, as an adult, as a new lawyer and now as somebody who's been in the field of disability advocacy for a long time, I just came to know that the way I was going to do legal research was calling people who knew the answer, and getting it from them. And it wasn't a traditional way of doing what research. And generally I've just found shortcuts if you will, to get me the information that I needed. 

When I was a Hill staffer, that's the way Hill staffers operate. In a lot of ways Washington is a town where everyone has Attention Deficit. Nobody wants to read anything more than one page. So if it's a Senator, if it's a Senator's chief of staff, if it's his communications manager if it's the President, if it's an assistant secretary, nobody wants anything more than one page. So if you can't put it on one page, you basically can't communicate to the people that are in the most important policy making positions. So Washington, I think people like me thrive in Washington because we know how to get it down to one page. There's a city built for that. That's what the founding father's had in mind. (Laughter). Well where do we put all the people with ADHD? Well can you talk a little bit about then, I've always wondered, or I've always found it hard to use the term disability, because I don't think I believe that the behaviors, the approach to life is disabling. So have you thought about that? Well sure, let's just take, let's assume that when I was a child, K-12, I had a learning disability. And I had attention deficit or some kind of hyperactivity. I could envision a path where I got labeled, I got put in special education, and then I somehow had to overcome that in order to achieve what I achieved. 

For whatever reason, growing up in an upper-middle class white school district, I never got the label. Some of the stuff that I was doing, if I was African-American, I probably would have gotten a label, if I was a low income kid, I probably would have gotten a label. So I totally get how being labeled disabled in certain contexts can be very disempowering and can lower expectations. For me as an adult with a mental health condition that has a label of bipolar disorder or manic-depression. The word disability is actually a preferred word for me than the term mental illness or psychiatric disability. And I guess for me people ask us at the American Association of People with Disabilities, "How do you define disability?" And we say we don't see it a medical term. We see it more as a political term. If you have a life experience where you feel a connection to this constituency that our society has come to view as disabled, we welcome you into the fold, we're not interested in drawing lines. So for example for our summer internship program, we bring 18 college students with disabilities every summer. We ask them on their application form, "Do you self identify as a person with disability?" If they say "Yes" we don't ask them what the disability is, we don't ask them for a letter from a doctor. But they have to say yes to that question if they're going to participate in our program. We also have a 10,000 dollar cash award we do for emerging leaders with disabilities. Same thing, "Do you self identify?" If they say yes, that's all we need to hear. But it was fascinating last summer, our 18 interns were blogging all summer, it was kind of a new element of our program. And a lot of their personal blogging was about disability identity. 

So we had a deaf new graduate from Gallaudet, Leah Catz-Fernandez, and all this stuff is online if people want to look it up. But she had some really, I thought, insightful blogs about her identity. Very comfortable as a deaf woman, not real comfortable with the word disability. And she kind of unpacked that a little bit over the course of the summer. And it was, how for her being around other folks with different kinds of disabilities and getting kind of a political feel for what the word meant, as opposed to a medical field for it. She started to like question "Why am I so uncomfortable with this word? What am I associating with this word that...? And maybe this word is more like "deaf" And it's just another way to express a cultural political identity." So I do think that's something that people have to learn. For me, I got comfortable self- identifying as a person with a disability when I was working in a disability rights organization in Boston. And I kind of saw it as a source of credibility. A connection to my client constituency. I didn't see a lot of people with psychiatric disabilities who were open about them, and I was a lawyer, I had a lot of skills, I had a lot of status, even as a new person in the organization. So I felt like, if I can't self identify, how do I expect my clients to self-identify?