Interview with Ellie Browning, August 8, 2022

THOMPSON: Hello, my name is Mack Thompson and today I'm interviewing Ellie Browning for the Disabled in Kentucky Oral History Project. The date is August 8, 2022, and we are in Lexington, Kentucky. Ellie I'm happy you're here thank you for meeting with me today.

BROWNING: Thank you for having me.

THOMPSON: Of course, of course, starting things off would you feel comfortable sharing a little bit about yourself?

BROWNING: Yeah. So my name is Ellie Browning, I am a junior in college right now, rising junior, so I'm about to go into my first semester junior year. I'm sitting community leadership and development in the College of our Agriculture, with a minor currently in systems of agriculture, but I will probably be changing that to gender women studies. I am the Director of Inclusion Equity in the Student Government Association, and I'm also the Director or the Executive Officer of Internal Relations and College Democrats. On campus I mostly just focus on the students' rights and advocacy and community development.

THOMPSON: Awesome, thank you for sharing

that. So would you feel comfortable sharing a little bit about your relationship to or with disability and like perhaps what labels you might use or like what your disability might be? Anything along those lines.

BROWNING: Yeah so I was pretty fortunate. I grew up in a family that I would say the climate was not really friendly to talking about mental health and ability all the time, especially from my dad. My mom was a lot more open with that stuff, a lot more willing even to hear me out in theory like if there are things you're showing with you might not have labels but I'll attach them personally. But she was still willing to make like personal accommodations in raising me. But I was pretty fortunate in that I was just hanging out with one of her friends who happened to be a child psychiatrist. And I was writing on a piece of paper one day and she was like Pamela, that's my mom, have you ever had Ellie tested for anything, or screened? And she was like no, no, you know, she's pretty quiet but that's about

it. So I did not talk until I was five. I did not talk at all. And I had been screened for hearing and speech disorders just because they weren't sure if there was some sort of like barrier, if I just wasn't understanding what was happening. And once I did talk I like would not shut up. But for those first five years I was pretty much silent. So once this friend of my mom who was a childhood psychiatrist, like she got to hang out with me and getting to see me behave a little bit just in interactions with my mom. She told my mom that she was pretty positive I had dysgraphia, which is a written disorder, a little bit similar to dyslexia. And a lot of people are familiar with dyslexia but what distinguishes is that dysgraphia is a writing disability and dyslexia is a learning disability. When I was little I was not really aware of how that impacted me, it didn't really occur to me that like when I was seeing things that other people saw looked differently. But kind of the early on

symptoms of that were like I would see a picture of an airplane and the words airplane were very hard for me to associate with the picture. So how I store words visually, how I hear them and read them are completely different stories it's just like this huge miscommunication and now that I'm like in my adulthood seeing how it's impacted me is a lot different. Just as a college student, as a research assistant just having jobs that are mostly academic you have to write like 50 percent of your career. So, so much of what I did is writing and it impacts like every single stage of that process. So as an adult like some of those symptoms look more like struggling to find words, and that's something that everyone deals with but it's something that I deal with like things I should know, things that are in my field especially like student

government words I should know. Like I should know what the basic needs center is. I should know what the different acronyms of the different committees and student government are I've been employed for three years. Like those are things you would think someone in that position ought to know, and I do understand them but in retrieval and often in speech I'll get things very simple mixed up like that. And from my perception it can kind of change how people see my credulity. But I think from other people's perception it's more just like slip of the tongue, but it happens to me all the time. So that's more my personal relationship with disability. And with dysgraphia it's accompanied by like a lot of comorbidity like ADHD and just other adult learning disabilities like processing disorders and dyslexia itself. I've never been tested for dyslexia but ADHD is something I'm in the process of looking at because just a lot of attentive things that you can think are dysgraphia, you can think are something else. But they also might

not be so you might not actually be applying the right solutions because you didn't identify the problem but more like growing up around disability and what that meant outside of my personal life. I also grew up with two parents who were disabled in different ways. My dad had a very tough issue both with chronic like physical health and mental health. And I think growing up that shaded a lot of how I view disability, and what it meant to be like disabled myself, and how that impacted my identity, when I grew up with like a negative figure who I had always viewed as disabled in a general gist.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. So are you saying that, like, with your parents, like, that was something that, like, negatively impacted your journey or positively impacted. I'm sorry I'm kind of struggling to understand what you're saying

there.

BROWNING: No, that's valid. I was saying that with my dad definitely negatively. Just I had always been viewed to see this disability as something that created negative characteristics, negative traits. Like the way he acted wasn't how, correlated to the way he was created or the way he was born, not created but the way he was born. The way he entered this world was somehow responsible for the way he created us, and the way he mentally coped with what was going on with his body and mind. So to me it always had to get modeled to me that dealing with physical and mental barriers results in negative behavior and negative relationships was always just like a really strong association. That if this is something I'm dealing with then I'll probably treat the people in my life a similar way that he did. But that's definitely not true and I've had other people in my life who modeled the opposite for me, that you

can, two things can be true at one time. You know you can be a person who struggles with something and a person who is also good at those same things. So probably a negative influence earlier and a negative influence with thinking of myself as possibly having that same like one strong negative outcome. But also a lot of positive influences because there's just a lot of genetic things in my family that people have always been honest about possessing. So I've always know like okay my aunt struggles with this, my dad has this whole plate of things that he struggles with, so it's okay to be honest about like naming them. But with such negative models and like such negative role models with what that looked like to name and act I did develop that negative association. But it didn't really always negatively impact me if that makes sense.

THOMPSON: Yes, that makes sense, thank you for sharing that.

BROWNING: Yeah.

THOMPSON: So you talked some already about like how, you know, dysgraphia has impacted

like your work and I'm just like curious if you feel comfortable sharing a bit more about that, tell me a bit more about that.

BROWNING: Yes, so in high school I had really poor access to education. I would say coming to college was really overwhelming for me like it is a lot of college students, especially in Kentucky where college readiness per capita rate is much, much lower. I don't think I'm like the only person in college who felt coming here that I was not at all prepared, not mentally, not like skill wise, and definitely not discipline wise. But growing up because of my poor access to education as a whole I really was not disciplined in any way to be prepared for school. I was not used to this class structure, I was not used to like being held to a standard or being responsible for doing things by yourself at all. But I had worked, I had worked for a long time at a restaurant

and there I got pre-acquainted with how dysgraphia impacted me. But also I learned a lot of discipline and how to like make things for yourself, and learn hard things, and teach yourself despite teaching barriers you might have that other people don't. So I worked at Ranch C's Diners for three and a half years. I started as a host and then I became a server later. But there as like a high schooler just because in school I'd never been tested a lot, I've never been pushed and my learning disability hadn't really impacted me because I wasn't held to any standard. But now you know I have a job, I'm held to a much higher standard and if I mess up that affects other things. And a big part of my job was writing, it was doing either the host waitlist or taking orders and giving them to the kitchen. And in those communications like you have to be perfect, if you mess something up that's your fault and they don't care if you have a learning disability like you need to get over it because they pay you to be here for a reason. That's what I was always told in that environment,

which I don't agree with, but that's the standard I was held to and so it pushed me to learn quickly. Like okay I need to know what's going to impact me negatively in this environment, what's going to be hard for me to overcome that are not going to be the areas that they will accommodate. So I learned that I have a really hard time like hearing and writing at the same time which you can understand transfers like really poorly to school because I cannot like hear lectures and take notes at the same time. But I am really good at like memorizing and writing at the same time. So I can usually like memorize what people say beforehand and then listen well like writing what was written before, but I cannot listen and write about the same thing at the same time. So I'll usually like listen to a chapter while taking notes on the chapter before and writing them out. And that's something that I learned that was going to be a barrier like being at Ramsey's. The way I write, just like the way I hold my pens and the certain pens that I made

just because of a pretty strong symptom of dysgraphia. Like a common one is having difficulty, just a lot of discomfort holding your pen properly or even like having your elbow on the table or needing like some very specific posture to feel comfortable writing. So when I was taking orders I learned pretty quickly like there's a way I can hold my pen and then there's a way I can move so that I'm not just mentally having a hard time teaching myself how to write. Some other things that I learned there that I was able to figure out more quickly coming to college that were barriers, it's definitely like verbal communication too. There's a lot of words that are shorthand in a server's manual. They give you an idea, they give you like an instruction manual on how to read the menu and when you write the tickets you write different words than what the menu says. And that actually taught me a lot how to take notes in a way that I would quickly

like be able to memorize without having to take physical notes like most people. Using just like shorthand words to memorize like whole paragraphs or sentences or at least get the concept was something that I learned from that server's manual. So now at college like I will write single words for sentences and that's something that's transferred really well for me but still something that is a product of dysgraphia in the sense that those words are strong as indicators.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. So you've talked some about the struggles you've had at school. And I was like wondering like at UK have you sought out accommodations from the disability resource center?

BROWNING: No, I have not. So my strategy for tests, I usually finish tests really quickly. Time restraints

are not something I usually struggle with. One of the bigger barriers of dysgraphia is that you can't have a connection between like what's on the page and what's in their mind. And sometimes like a couple of hours can help with that, but for me it would be a couple of hours. I study enough for tests to try and counteract the fact that if I blank on something I'll blank on all the information just because it is so associative. But if I can memorize even key words that relate to one thing so that if I forget one thing I'll remember like four others. I can usually remember really quickly so a time accommodation has never helped me in the past, not in high school. Like once it gets to the point that I cannot write what I'm trying to say I usually can't or it would take me a while to get to the point that I can. Now at this point like I will study in a particular way where

I have key words, I know what concepts are going to click for me and I can usually be out of a test like as quickly as I can write it. It doesn't take me a lot of time to think about it, I almost don't think for tests, I just go in, get down what I memorize and I'm out. So I have not.

THOMPSON: I was just curious because like when you were talking about like for note taking and stuff I was just thinking that like that there is an accommodation that's like they'll have a note taker aside for you that doesn't know that they're taking this for you, just taking notes for the class. I was like do you think that's something that would help you or is that something that's just like a lot of trauma, like stuff like that?

BROWNING: I think one of the reasons that I feel like dysgraphia is such a big impairment in college often is because writing is the best way to memorize. Just like we know that you're a lot more likely to be able to comprehend things when you write then, when you take written notes. But also when you rewrite information that you've already written.

So I'm trying to like overcome that. I do write, I can write all of my notes myself. Like I'll usually type notes, and I can type notes pretty quickly, but then I'll go through and rewrite them. So I'm pretty particular about notes. I think it is just because like the word association and different words associate different things for me. I can never have like bullet point notes or rarely can have bullet point notes and have them applicable to my learning style, regardless I want to say regardless of any resources supplied. But it just feels like often the resources that are supplied while they're helpful and supplemental in some ways, and I'm sure to a lot of people a lot of what they specifically go for, I would have to in my experience have been the person to create those resources for myself because I know what works best for me and it's hard for me to find that elsewhere, like just knowing how my brain

works.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing. And I guess this is just like a clarifying question from earlier when you talk about like growing up. I'm sorry I should have like asked this earlier. But you talked about growing up I was just wondering like where you were from before you went to UK?

BROWNING: So I was raised in the military. My dad was in the air force and we moved every two-to-three years. I was raised in California initially and then moved to Alabama, Georgia, Washington State like Seattle, and then I lived in D.C. for three years and then back to California for five, and then I moved here. And I've lived here for eight years.

THOMPSON: Do you think moving around a lot and like changing environment, changing schools, do you think that that had some--did that interact with your relationship with dysgraphia in this disability to you?

BROWNING: I would say yeah, I haven't really thought about it in that context before but

I think as a whole information can be a lot more overwhelming for me and even like sensory information, like the environment I grew up in that's still things that you have to process. And because it is like a cognitive processing disorder it doesn't impact everything the same but it still impacts everything. So it was I would say growing up with so many like colloquialisms in different areas and different accents in different areas, even like the smallest thing and differences in where you grow up and Kentucky. That sort of thing was a lot harder for me to process because of the differences in noises and regional associations, those sort of words that belonged to one area, those sort of things were really hard for me to adjust to. But as a whole I had like a pretty isolated environment growing up so I would say that there was so much going on that the move definitely compounded other parts of my life, and like moving often compounded

other parts of my life. But specific impact on disability more over that it's a little ray.

THOMPSON: Would you feel comfortable sharing about some of those other impacts or is that something that you don't really want to talk about?

BROWNING: No, I can talk about that more. Yeah, so growing up in the military we moved a lot and I when my siblings were attending school we lived in D.C. And D.C. has some of the highest rates for like school shootings and just general violent crime in public schools. And so my mom decided not to put us in school and homeschool us. So I was diagnosed with my learning disability at five and my mom she did have an education but she was not educated in disability at all. And that is generally referred to as like academic abuse when children especially like children with disabilities need specific

academic measures that their parents are aware of and do not accommodate or even like more specifically actively neglect. So I was like homeschooled but I was not homeschooled at all. I was really just like given history books I couldn't read because I was six and I had a learning disability. And I was like you took a history credit and then that's essentially what my high school degree is, is all of these classes that you're supposed to take as a homeschooler in Kentucky or as a homeschooler wherever I was when I took those classes, that my mom gave me like a book for or something else for. Or like an associated activity but not really curriculum, and not at all like the sort of education the United States standard is held to, which I know is like not a high standard. I don't like the standard but my standard was like way below that, when I say like I would have given anything to go to public high school and have those class structures and like actually have that information

given to me as a child, like I mean that. And in some ways it has also been beneficial because there's parts of united education, like the United States education system that's definitely in my opinion brainwashing and I was not a part of that because I was not in the public school system. So a lot of what other people have been taught like have been brainwashed the word I would use their whole lives in everyday classes, in ways that they don't even know I was completely isolated from. So I think that's kind of like double edged, I had to teach myself a lot like I had to teach myself most of high school before coming to college because it wasn't something taught to me. And that was definitely compounded by my learning disability just because it's already hard to teach yourself like geometry and algebra, and grammar and grammar two and like all these things that you need to get a high SAT score so that you can get funding for college. It's made worse when you learn at probably like twice the rate of the average person. You know a lot of people can write an email quickly.

That's something that like that task, the combination of skills required by writing, and how I'm impacted by all of those, that's a task that can take me like an hour or like two hours just because it takes so much like personal thought. It takes motor skills, and it takes like words in a specific order that are hard for me to just naturally produce. So that can take me a really long time. But after I got over kind of like that threshold of like learning is scary I don't know if I can do this I realized that I didn't really have a choice like if I wanted to go to college. If I wanted to have a chance at being taught by other people outside what I've been deprived of most of my life then I needed to work like really hard now. So I studied for the ACT, got a high enough ACT score to get mostly funded for school here and I lied on my transcript about all the classes I took in high school. And now like at this point they

can't do anything about it, you know, it's just like you know child protective services should have been called, other things should have happened that the government could have prevented. If you're going to try like take my high school diploma away from me that's just, that's very ableist. So yeah a lot of things did impact it growing up but definitely the education, being deprived of that and then having to compensate myself for what I wasn't taught was the biggest exacerbated too.

THOMPSON: It sounds really difficult. So like I guess you talked some about the challenges, I guess if you feel comfortable changing subjects a little bit. You talked some about the challenges with your position, like with the student government association and with other things the challenges of like with your dysgraphia. But I'm curious if that's given you a unique insight especially because you

do a lot of diversity work and social justice oriented work I believe. Also like I mean and even like down to like political work. And I was wondering if any of that has like interacted with your identity as someone who is dysgraphic who has a disability like I was wondering if you thought that was--?

BROWNING: I would say definitely in like at least two big ways that stand out to me. One it's definitely impacted how I think people really on any issue but specifically like you said working in DI specifically how things like ability and wellness rights can be advocated for at a student level. It's definitely opened my eyes to how much power we actually have in achieving the issues we bring up and where a lot of the bigger error comes from. And then on the other end it's also opened me more to like some of the internal

barriers we face even as student advocates and, you know, I just said that it's opened my eyes to ways that I feel like student government can help and ways that we can advocate for ourselves in administration. But it's also opened me to how in those conversations there's a lot of hostility still, and there's a lot that needs to be done to just create like a welcoming environment as a whole. So on like advocating and how it's opened my eyes to community advocation on campus it is a lot easier to get money for grants and for student based initiatives than I think a lot of people are aware of. And it really just has to take, like it really just takes a strong argument and the right person who has institutional funding. A lot of those people are in student government, you know, a lot of senators get grants for special like senate projects where they are given a real

amount of money. And sometimes like when you're in student government I think it is easy to see it as money we're dis-attached from, it's money we don't actually possess. But I think at the same time we should take more ownership because those are real dollars and those are real tuition dollars. But it's also money that we may feel closer to and we have like a more personal understanding of how much that could impact our campus, we're probably more likely to use it again sparely and wisely and like with good stewardship. So all students at UK are charged a student organization and activities fee and that is divided between five fee funded organizations, one of them is Student Government Association, there's student organization, there's student activities board and power active service breaks and dance blue. So as a fee funded organization all of our initiatives,

all of the money we get comes almost like very significantly from tuition dollars, but also from federal grants. So in that there's two ways you can make an argument for spending money on anything, either a federal argument or a tuition dollars argument. Students pay, like student pay to go here and this is a service that students should pay as like as a government entity that we should give students back with their money. Or too this is something the government owes students and we have evidence to argue that. Either way it's heavily evidence based but if you can get that evidence and you can get it to someone who is in office and you can write that in collaboration then you can often see it through. It's not always that streamlined and I wish it was more streamlined but there's a lot more like grants just even different kinds of grants from multicultural organizations for specific events. For organizations as a whole like you can get, you can apply

for money, and you can apply for money for like specific grants for events. And there's also more cabinets in the executive branch that like safety, DI that's me, and government relations that collaborate with organizations in order to use their budget in the executive branch to kind of distribute amongst campus. So I think we could talk more especially if we talked more like if government had a bigger presence on campus more people would utilize those services. But they're just not accessible, they're not accessible at all. And that's a thing that I've been way more aware of this year in my position is that we do have a lot of services to offer people and a lot of the basis that I go for is we should be the platform. Like I don't think I should be going to organizations and saying I'm student government and I know exactly what you need to do with this money and then I'm going to police what you do with it. I think it should more be like I'm student government and I

know how you can get more money, you tell me what you want to do with it and we'll help you get it. So if there was a greater presence established on campus by student government I think we would have better access to actually distributing and making an impact. But as it is right now there is I would say our impact is definitely limited by how much we reach out to people and different organizations. And then like in the job itself me the limitations I face definitely just like self confidence is probably a big part of it. Feeling like your ability or even just insecurities about it impact how you're taken as a professional. And especially like a student representative like as a governor there's such in my opinion like specific images we attach to government in the United States that a lot of people don't

fit and a lot of people don't feel comfortable like disrupting. It shouldn't feel disruptive just as a person with any identity, as a person who looks any sort of way to feel like uncomfortable walking to student government. Student government like is created by students ideally for students, and that's a big barrier I face and I know a lot of my friends have faced is just feeling that it does not embody that even in its internal presence. And a lot of that's like in smaller things, like speech awareness, a lot of people are not very conscious and I'm not always perfectly conscious I don't mean like a lot of people. But it is often an environment where we have standards of presentation and standards of like academia and knowledge and fitting a mold of prestige that is exclusive and it's hard to see from a lens that are

not shaded from different perspectives like what that actually looks like in smaller interactions. But it can look like a lot of things, like not giving people longer than five minute bathroom breaks, like having senate chambers that are not even accessible to people who cannot walk in a like half foot of space and be within half of the people and get out of their chairs, sit back down and pull it in. Stuff like that, like the environment as a whole we try to be conducive to representation but it's often internally blocked from achieving that itself.

THOMPSON: I'm sorry for the disruption in our interview there I guess like kind of related because we were talking about DEI when it occurred. I was wondering if you like think that like intersections of being disabled and perhaps some of your other identities or experiences have like impacted you with your work

or just in general?

BROWNING: Yeah, I think intersectionality and identity is kind of already like a hard conversation there because you never want to wholly hold the communities you're from especially with communities of color. Like wholly responsible for what I would say is something is like objectively wrong. You know there are things you can say to people and we teach people and communities that are often especially certain messages more common in certain communities. And it doesn't come from like a fault in the community itself it comes from different things in the world. It comes from how the nation and society as a whole has treated that community, and what it's taught that community to feel about itself, but also what we've been taught in education to teach our children to feel about themselves. So I think being

an Asian American world yes there's definitely a lot of intersectionality there in how other parts of my identity overlap with also identifying as disabled. Growing up it's just not as much as a conversation especially with in my family being Southeast Asian, like Filipino to be exact with signs there is like a pretty high standard of academia and what is considered like conventional success isn't transferable like I would consider like conventional success in the US. But it's still kind of that high standard that I think a lot of Americans who are not Asian attach to Asian communities. Traditional jobs that you see as making more money are held a lot, like are held to a lot higher prestige than other jobs like getting your degree or Bachelor of Arts is not nearly as

significant to your family as getting a bachelor's in science and stuff like that. But there's also like smaller things that I think a lot of stereotypes can't really capture. I would say like right now COVID-19 is hugely impactful in the Asian American community, one in hate crimes but two just how it's impacted like the family structure as a whole. Asian Americans are a lot more likely to have elderly as part of the family structure. They're also more likely to take illness seriously and take especially things like the flu and viral like pandemics seriously historically. So this year last these past two years it's been a lot harder to like interact with most American college students and have an understanding like that you have a family system that needs you to act differently right now. Like I have people who are immunocompromised and

elderly in my family who I'm responsible for. And a part of that personal responsibility that is less common in like more conventional traditional families, American families is like making sure that when I'm here and present that I'm also making sure everyone's safe back home. No matter where I am that's a responsibility that I juggle, I can't fully be here for myself because I'm responsible as a woman who is older in my family and as a woman who is also doing pretty well. I'm responsible for making sure that everyone in my family is too throughout like the pandemic, throughout stop raising hate right now, everything.

THOMPSON: There's something that I'm curious about. I guess this is again not necessarily specifically about disability but related, when you were, like I guess, obviously on the lens of everything is related with intersectionality. But I was curious being in Kentucky in a predominantly white institution studying agriculture

and stuff, if that's something that's like impacted like your relationship with your base and with your understanding of yourself?

BROWNING: Yeah for sure and I think like even growing up in California versus growing up here the racial climate, like the racial climate on campuses is very different, is very contrasted. And I think it's easy to be in this environment for a while and see us as doing well, and not realize that like this progress is definitely relative. Being in Kentucky and in a predominantly white college is like a lot worse than I thought it would be honestly. And my family wasn't worried about it until I went, like I'm the whitest person in my family. No-one's worried about me getting hate crimed, they're just worried about me not being respected, and not having access to

what would be considered equitable services to me. Not that like not additional but definitely equitable, like meeting needs that are not felt by all communities equally so that I'm able to equally achieve here. I think it is especially hard to see kind of like the difference between the College of Agriculture in different colleges and it was something I was surprised by is that the College of Agriculture I think has a much better approach to DEI. I think it's a lot more practiced and I can see it more in like the day to day measures and standards. Something that I don't see like a lot of other colleges do, something as small as like a land acknowledgement is very common in the College of Agriculture. But it's also more common to like inform your students, at least in my experience, of the services that are available to them, and like encourage participation that

would help make an intersectional experience, positive experience, at this university given its realistic environment, happen for you as an individual. I've had a really good experience with like professors here, but as far as how offices are actually presented and how especially how we engage students of different populations and how we actually do outreach from a college level and also from a university level, or from a college level I've had a good experience in the College of Agriculture. It's just been surprising to see around how other colleges possibly because of that social association that the College of Agriculture would have more negative DEI stereotypes within it and thinking within it there is more of a clear effort to divert that. So I think that's something that the rest of the university

would definitely benefit from and I've also just not seen a whole lot of effort.

THOMPSON: I guess it's just--

BROWNING: I think a lot of, it's not really from a place of like apologizing or anything it's more from a point of like education and understanding that this institution for the majority of its existence was like strictly for white people by white people for white excellence. And that's not something that leaves an institution, like most of what this university has done even now benefits who it's always benefited. And even efforts we make to benefit like rural communities in Kentucky we often don't divert funding from communities of color but we often advertise for blanket diversity funding and we target lower income students at Kentucky without being more conscious to where, to the actual like ethnic identity of these lower income students. When we take

diversity funding that we usually advertise for having like increased numbers and diverse ethnicity like students who are non-white identifying, we often take that funding and we put it back into things that recruit for a lower income. And lower income that encapsulates everyone regardless of your racial ethnic identity so it's stuff like that. Like there's really--I don’t see a lot of intention to be better, I see a lot of kind of like mainstream appeasement, but I feel like as far as like the institution goes I don't think the DI efforts are great personally.

THOMPSON: Do you think--I guess this is tangential from like we're not asking specifically like UK but more like do you think that being Filipino American and being a woman and being dysgraphic do you think either of these interact with your like experiences. I guess I kind of asked this already but in a different way.

Like do you have anything you want to add with that I guess because I kind of already asked that I'd forgotten until I started talking.

BROWNING: No, you're fine.

THOMPSON: If you don't have anything you want to discuss it's fine.

BROWNING: I think it's kind of like one thing that I'd say I'm even more of aware of is definitely the privilege. You know like I appear as a white-passing, able-bodied woman and being here in like a predominantly white institution especially where coming from a community I was socializing in a more diverse environment like I look for a more diverse environment here. And I would say in experiences that I've shared with people of color, students of color like me are not white-passing

has made me a lot more aware of how like your identity and your physical presentation does exacerbate the underlying root causes of things. Just even in things like how your disability is respected. I think a lot about how people respect my knowledge when things like that happen, when I feel like my inability is impacting my profession and my job, or if I say something wrong or if I do something wrong to me. I think a lot about how I'm going to be perceived as less professional because of that, I don't think a lot about how I'm going to be perceived as less professional because of my skin tone because it's just not something that I have to think about. But there are a lot of places and a lot of places in this campus, a lot of like rooms, a lot of conversations with administrators where that is something that if I had to worry about it I would be worried about. Because it's a lot more prevalent in this environment than I think you can understand until you are in the

perspective of someone else.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. Do you feel like that Lexington is accessible to you as like a city compared to other cities that you've been in even?

BROWNING: Honestly I think it's accessible to me. Physical--I would say like public transport and the range of that seems like a product of the reality of like how Lexington is in a mostly rural state. And growing up in Los Angeles and like D.C. I've been in a lot more crowded areas like inner city where there's a lot of public transportation. So I can see how like the population is a big reasons why there's not a lot more public transport. But it's also a huge barrier and it's a huge barrier with Lexington housing being

so expensive. That's one of I would say like the least accessible things about Lexington to everyone is how expensive it is to live here versus how much you get paid. And then like job accessibility from like a disabled perspective as well that's a whole thing with like jobs being less accessible and then housing being less accessible as well. But I would say like the physical landscape for me personally I do find accessible, but I don't find the campus physical environment to be accessible, not even just like often like the doors and stuff like that are not well maintained enough to like open for handicapped. Just like really simple things to greater scale things like routes and how you would actually get somewhere if there were certain ways and exact paths they expect you to take that you cannot physically accommodate. Like how much longer that's going to make--like stuff like that on a campus where it's really just

whack and does impact your day to day by just like hours sometimes. Stuff like that where it's not like even a thought in scheduling classes that is readily accommodated. Things like that I don't think the community is not accessible to at all, but I guess on like the greater Lexington community I wouldn't feel as comfortable speaking on it just I'm not out there as much. I'm not sure about the physical co-accessibility but personally I've always felt like that I can access the community.

THOMPSON: That's good to hear. Do you know anything, and it's okay if you don't, but do you know anything about like or have any experience with social or government resources for people who have disabilities? Or you can also talk about at UK like if you don't that's all right too.

BROWNING: I

could speak a little bit on definitely like resources that UK has. I've not accessed a lot of them. One thing that I would recommend that I have accessed is the hold on it's like the life coaching of SOA. There's a more specific name for it I'm sorry I'm blanking on it but there are for the model they use there's like five different kinds of wellness. And I would recommend that sort of life coaching to anyone because it helps you a lot to understand how to balance, like, your physical, mental, and financial and student health. And that's really hard to understand like coming to college and adjusting is like all your different resources that you need for all the different things that you need help with. So having someone who understands the university's resources meet with you

one on one in what areas you probably need help in achieving full wellness so that you can be like a healthy student here. I would recommend making one of those like life coaching appointments and getting more educated with what services will specifically serve you. That helped me a lot so--but other services that I have not used but that I would recommend basic needs center, I would recommend reaching out to anyone who feels--one issue that I would say that I have is feeling like things are really expensive and that I have to pay for more expensive things just because they're more accommodating to small things I deal with. Like even the texture of certain things and specifically pens like that can be expensive. So I think it's smart to think of things in kind of a checks and balances sort of way that if there's things you can't get UK to cover for your disability the personal cost that you feel you would have to absorb there are other ways that you can get other things

covered that might help you balance that checkbook a little more. You can usually get free backpacks, or you get a lot of free school supplies, and you can get cheaper services when you consult with like university health services before actually going for a physical consultation. So small things like that in financial stability, which to me has been like a bit impacting coming here, quite a bit impacting coming here. That's something that has helped me feel more control of like the general impact, and how disability correlates with that, is having a better understanding of like financial wellness at UK as a whole, and how to get any free resources I can.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. Would you be okay if I asked some broader questions now?

BROWNING: Yes.

THOMPSON: It's just what do you wish people knew either about disability in general or specifically about dysgraphia and your experiences with it?

BROWNING: I would say

one thing that's come up in personal relationships for me a lot is the amount of time I spend doing school. I do take school seriously and I like feeling like I know what I'm doing in my classes. But it's not wholly about that, it's not because I'm like a perfectionist who needs to spend hundreds of hours on one paper and I need to let it go and calm down. It's honestly because it takes me that much more time to focus and be able to produce something I'm confident in. And I think the confidence is a big thing that a lot of people don't understand how that plays an impact in just like day to day interactions and day to day. Like success is when you don’t fit like either a mental or physical standard that you've created your self advocacy, your vision of yourself is impacted by that. And it shouldn't be, like you're right for looking and acting the way you are, but it's also okay to acknowledge that because you don't you feel worse about yourself and your abilities because of it. So I want people to know that a lot more

people are impacted by any kind of ability or disability that you might not be aware of and the impact of that is not solely, it's not ever going to be point A it's going to be like point abcd-z. It's always going to have smaller ways that it impacts people and it's always going to be impacted by their intersectionality and their identity as well. So no matter what like your experience with dysgraphia is, no matter what you've heard of it, no matter what you anticipate mine is it probably does look different. And you would only be able to know how I find accommodations or make accommodations for myself or barriers I'm to face in life if you don't speak to me, like you can only know if you speak to me. I'd also I would wish that people understood how common it is a lot because I think there's this idea, I think it's okay to be surprised when someone in your life is going through something you didn't expect, but it's also very common to hear this idea

of like oh I never thought it would be like someone close to me. Like it's like catching like an illness or something, it's like another one, like someone in my personal life just happens to be disabled. And it's like well a lot of people probably are and it's also something that's like healthy to be comfortable with saying like I have a disability not just like you see me as disabled. Like it's okay to have that conversation and be surprised, but it's also healthy to acknowledge that there are a lot more people around you dealing with things that you probably can't see, that you're probably not aware of.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. Do you have any advice for someone who may have recently discovered that they might be dysgraphic or of another disability or trying to go through that process?

BROWNING: I would say for dysgraphic specifically look into other things as well. Just because of how

your brain works and with dysgraphia it definitely notices earlier. Depending on which type you have there are specific parts of your brain they know are not working properly and when they can locate that there's usually other regional like locational things that might cause related issues. So if you think that you're dysgraphic and you think you might also be dyslexic you could definitely be right about both, and if you think that you're dysgraphic or ADHD it's like there's a compound effect because those things are related in just what they're going to impact you on. They're also a lot more related in how likely they are that you possess them both at the same time. So I would say no matter what you think you have, you're considering getting help be insistent on all of your symptoms being attending to because that's another thing. As it is easy to look at dysgraphia as dyslexia but it's not treated like dyslexia not that it can be cured

but as far as like seeking accommodations those accommodations are different than dyslexia. So it's easy to meet someone and have them tell you, you have dyslexia when you might have dyslexic dysgraphia which is very different in practice and in theory. So I think it's important to advocate for yourself and know that if you're dealing with something to find means to accommodate that. Not that you just made it up or that this might be like an accommodating factor, like this might be just a symptom that I experience that other people don't, it might be but it also might be something else. So you don't know everything but the doctors also don't know everything, and you know more about yourself and your experience than anyone else will ever be able to tell you from the outside. And I would also like highly encourage if it's accessible to you and if it's not see if you can find especially through like universities a means of free counseling. It's really easy to put things in the boxes such

as like this is mental health, this is physical health and if I deal with these things I'm dealing with them independently, but they're often like a lot more intersectional than that. And to deal with your physical health and your mental health and academic health you also have to deal with all of them at the same time. So in dealing with your disability especially if it's something at this point in your life you're seeking diagnosis for I'd recommend going to counseling because there's probably a lot of instances in your life that it will help explain, or maybe just a lot of insecurities that you've been carrying throughout your whole life that you have no system of thinking belong to a disability until that's taught to you. Because you can't just learn that on your own you have to be taught, so go to counseling, counselor will validate you and tell you that it's okay to feel the way you do for what you're learning about yourself even though it's overwhelming.

THOMPSON: Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about or wanted to talk about in more detail that we really haven't yet, or that you would like

to add to the conversation that we have been having today?

BROWNING: Yeah, this is something I thought of earlier but I did talk a little bit about my mom and how I had like a really negative relationship with mental health based mostly on my dad growing up, but that she really compounded that by her neglect of education. I think it's hard not to hold your parents responsible for ways that they've hurt you, for neglecting any sort of disability no matter what that looks like in your life or how that impacted you growing up if it did. It's hard not to be really angry about that and at times often in my experience I feel it's right to be angry about it. And you think like I know there are instances throughout my childhood that if it had been my child I would have done something, and not just because of modern things, you know, things have changed since then, parents have changed since then. You know I agree with that, the standards we hold parents to have changed,

but there's also just basic what's right and wrong. If your child is hurting you should listen to them and it's okay to look back and think like my parent neglected me and they hurt me, or they were angry with me, or they didn't deal with something in a way that I would have done differently and I'm mad at them for that. There are things that both my parents did that were very wrong but my mom has also been the best person in my life and there were things in my childhood that she did wrong and I was mad at her about that. We had conversations about that and I forgave her and she has learned a lot about how our family situation as a whole growing up was also very negative for her and it stopped her from growing, it stopped her from loving herself so she taught us not to love ourselves. But that's something we talked about and now growing up I realize that there were things she dealt with her whole life, there were ability issues, there were mental health issues that I never knew about that she was living with in silence.

So that's what she taught me. Often a lot of the things we face are genetic and if they're not genetic a lot of times they're socially generational and a lot of the things that even I experienced in my life growing up like access to education, the insecurities I faced, those are all things that my mom felt in her childhood and she was conditioned to produce in mind. And I can be mad at her about that and also forgive her now that she has said she's sorry and she has learned, now that she's done that I can forgive her for it and see that she was impacted by that too and that that's like really held her back her whole life even though she wanted to love me the best she could it was something that prevented her. So it's hard to have relationships especially with your parents if you have parents with disability and you are also disabled. It's hard to if they do not have a healthy relationship with it have a healthy

relationship. But for me it's been a really good opportunity to learn from someone who has always protected me like how to grow as a person, because you can make really, really big mistakes and still grow as a person and love people better. And she's always like worked every day since then to love me better so that's what I would like to add just to clarify that. My mom is an amazing person and I love her and she has not stunted my growth at all. Right now she is the reason I am where I am.

THOMPSON: That's amazing, thank you for sharing that.

BROWNING: Absolutely.

THOMPSON: Is there anything else you would like to add today?

BROWNING: I don't think so, do you have any other questions?

THOMPSON: No, I think that's about it. Would you feel comfortable ending this interview now?

BROWNING: Yes.

THOMPSON: Right, thank you for coming here and talking with me today. It's was great talking to you.

BROWNING: Thank you for having me.

[End of interview.]