Study of Disabilities
Service Learning Project : Connections, Compassion, and Creating Awareness
When I began this project I had no idea how far-reaching and how big a part of my life it would
become. I started by creating a URL on Tumblr. I then created a single post, telling my
personal story and my experience being newly disabled, and posted it to submission blogs all
over the site. This brought traffic to my page, and my number of followers jumped from 2 to
200 in just a few weeks. From there I progressed on to finding disability advocacy groups,
chronic pain submission blogs, body and health acceptance pages and individuals with
disabilities and I followed those sites and continued to make connections.
As I found more blogs to follow, I found more info and articles to pass along through my own page. I also began to feel more comfortable sharing my own story; my own history, my own struggles with doctors, medications, physical therapy, and the emotional roller coaster that comes with a new disability. I also created an online relationship with Stop Hating Your Body, a self-love blog usually directed toward eating disorder recovery and transgender issues and started advocating for self-love and positive body image among individuals with disabilities. The connection with Stop Hating Your Body has also created a wonderful and positive dialogue between the disabled Tumblr community and the recovery and body acceptance communities. It is a relationship which is only beginning, and that will continue to grow long after this semester is over. The blog itself is still growing and evolving with an average of over 200 hits per day. I believe that I have worked to promote inclusion in society, even if it was just the “small” on-line world, it is a great start!
This project also obviously helped with communication among the disabled population, both between disabled peers and with the non-disabled community at large. I also hope that I served to provide a much-needed advocate for people with disabilities among the growing body-acceptance movement. I cannot even calculate the number of hours spent on this site, as it evolved into much more than a class project. I have created 200 original posts so far, and I have shared 700 more articles posted by other blogs.
