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Why I Want To Be A Self Advocate

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Throughout my life I have grown to believe there are many factors that contribute to the person you to become including your family and how the early years of your life were spent. For me something I had to learn on my own was how to speak for myself and become my own self-advocate. I was born two months premature, spent a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was only a couple of months old. Along with being born with a physical disability I was also born youngest and the only girl out of three children. As a result my parents along with my older brothers became very protective of me and often made decisions on my behalf. I became reserved as a child and was expected to go along with whatever I was told. However, as I grew and the amount of help I needed from aids hired by the schools I was attending declined I began to speak for myself more often and reject the decisions other people made on my behalf. There was no one specific moment that helped me decide I needed to begin making my own decisions and thanking for myself. Instead there were a series of small moments and decisions throughout my life that ended up becoming big problems as I grew. Some of the …show more content…

The assumption that I just had to go along with whatever decisions other people made for me changed as I started to grow and decided that even if it never happened I wanted to be able to be fully independent and live alone and making my own decisions was a big component of that dream. I have changed through this journey to becoming an advocate for myself by now having a higher level of confidence, more self-esteem, and even a better understanding of my disability. Even though my journey to becoming a self-advocate is not yet done I believe that I am a better person because of the decision I made to speak up for

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