Hi friends 

Welcome to the very first post on DisabilityGazebo. I can’t tell you how much it means to finally open the doors (or rather, lift the tent flaps!) to this space, a gathering place for the largest minority group in America: people with disabilities.

This isn’t just a website. It’s a shared home for community, activism, and learning a place built on the idea that disability doesn’t exist on the margins of society. It’s part of every family, every community, every life. And because of that, it deserves more than just a passing headline or a single awareness month.

That’s why the title of this post felt so right: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

Because that’s what disability really is, it’s all around us, shaping lives in quiet, everyday ways, even when we don’t notice.

Disability shows up:

• in a nonverbal autistic child’s bright imagination,
• in a partner learning to navigate life with blindness,
• in someone managing the storms of bipolar disorder,
• in the slow frustration of hearing loss,
• in the stiffness of arthritis or the fatigue of chronic pain that so often comes with aging.

It’s not rare. It’s not “out there.” It’s everywhere.

Sort of like the title of this blog post, DisabilityGazebo is meant to touch every corner of the disability experience. It brings together stories, resources, and tools for all kinds of disabilities. The hope is that by connecting people and sharing what we know, we can close some of the gaps that keep us apart and build real power for change through this medium, and many more.

When I think about what this space means, I think about my own experience living with PTSD, and how disability can sometimes feel invisible until it suddenly isn’t. It can be painful, and it’s always personal. I felt that most deeply during the COVID-19 shutdown, when someone I love, who lived her whole life with epilepsy, was fighting through one of her hardest seasons.

When I think of her, I think of light of long summer days when we’d laugh outside until the air turned gold, those rare moments when the world felt limitless and unbound by her disability. Those memories, that warmth, are the heart of DisabilityGazebo.

This space was built in her memory, and in honor of everyone who’s ever had to navigate a world not designed with them in mind.

So this gazebo is for all of us:
For those living with disabilities.
For those who love someone who does.
And for anyone curious about how disability connects to everything, everywhere, all at once.

Come as you are. Sit with us.
Share your stories. Learn something new.

With love and welcome,    

Abiodun