Every July, something magical happens in corporate America.

The stock photo of a smiling wheelchair user appears on the company intranet. A well-meaning email goes out from HR with the subject line “Celebrating Our Diverse Workforce!” Someone in marketing asks if we should post something. Someone else says yes. Nobody asks the one visibly disabled person on staff what they actually think. The post goes up. Everyone feels good about it. Nothing changes.

I’ve watched this cycle from both sides: as a keynote speaker hired to come in and “do the disability thing,” and as a legally blind woman who has spent years navigating a world that wasn’t built with her in mind.

Here’s what I want you to know about Disability Pride Month, from someone who actually gets to have opinions about it:

It’s not about inspiration. It’s not about awareness posters. And it is definitely not about your company’s accessibility score going up one month a year.

This year’s theme is The World Works Better With Us. I love that. Not “look how far we’ve come” or “raising awareness for those who suffer.” Just a clean, matter-of-fact statement of truth: when disabled people are fully included, in workplaces, in decisions, in leadership, things work better. For everyone.

I have Stargardt disease. It’s a degenerative retinal condition that means my central vision is essentially gone. I navigate airports, competition venues, training fields, and boardrooms with peripheral vision and a lot of informed confidence. I’m also on Team USA for parasurfing and training for the LA28 Paralympics in javelin. I run a business. I raised three kids, one of whom is Autistic.

None of this makes me inspirational. It makes me a person with a full, complicated, demanding life, which is exactly the same thing you have.

Quick side note, since it’s relevant here: yes, I have a disability, and yes, I’ll write about it sometimes, today included. But that’s not what this newsletter is going to be about. This is a place for anyone trying to get up and do a hard thing, whether that’s navigating a world that wasn’t built for you, leaving a marriage, changing careers at 40, or learning to surf when your life falls apart. Today, it’s about this. Next week it might be about something that has nothing to do with disability at all. Stick around either way.

What I want from Disability Pride Month, what I want from any of this, is simple: stop performing inclusion and start practicing it. That looks like accessible hiring processes. It looks like not asking your disabled colleagues to be your unpaid DEI consultants. It looks like building products and services that work for people across the full spectrum of ability from the start, instead of bolting on accommodations at the end.

It looks like treating us like colleagues, not case studies.

So here’s my invitation to you this July: skip the poster. Instead, ask one genuine question, to a disabled affinity group, to your HR team, to yourself. Where does our process break down for people who navigate the world differently?

That question, asked honestly and followed up on, is worth more than every awareness post combined.

And if you’re a person with a disability reading this: happy Disability Pride Month. The world does work better with us. Even when it takes a while to figure that out.

Before you go, sit with this for a second:

Where in your own life are you performing something (inclusion, confidence, having it together) instead of actually practicing it?

Who around you has never been asked what they actually think, and what would it cost you to ask?

Emily

P.S. Coming up: what I’ve learned about starting over when nothing about the plan is clear.

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Hi, I’m Emily.

On a stage, I’m Team USA. I’m a Paralympic hopeful. I’m the keynote speaker who shows up polished, hits her marks, and says all the right things about resilience in front of a room that came to be moved.

This is not that stage.

This is the place where I tell you what actually happened before the polished version, minus the lighting, minus the talking points, plus significantly more opinions and at least one story that starts with “so this happened at the airport.”

Quick version of me: I’m legally blind, I have ADHD, and I’m an elite athlete chasing a Paralympic dream. I’m also a mother of three amazing biracial kids. My oldest daughter is Autistic and has ADHD, and my other two kids have ADHD, which means every brain in this house runs on its own operating system and none of them are compatible with each other. Picture that logistics-wise, and you’re not far off. I’m also an entrepreneur and keynote speaker who gets paid to talk about resilience for a living, which means I have very strong opinions about the gap between how resilience gets marketed and how it actually feels.

Here’s the deal: the world was not built with people like me in mind, and I’ve decided the correct response to that is to call it out, laugh at the absurdity of it, and write about it here , no gatekeeping, no filter.

What you’re signing up for:

• The highlight reel’s smarter cousin. What elite competition actually costs when you can’t see the finish line, told with more edge than the sports documentary version.

• Motherhood, unfiltered. Raising three kids while also training and traveling. Four ADHD brains under one roof is less a household and more a live experiment in chaos theory. The wins, the meltdowns (mine included), and the systems that hold it all together (or don’t).

• The stuff I don’t say on stage. The equity fights still happening behind the scenes, the things about this industry that make me want to flip a table, and the advice I give my kids that I’m still working on taking myself.

• A place to actually be seen, not managed. No brand voice, no talking points just me, telling the truth about reinvention and resilience (see: Rayzilient, very clever, I know) with a sharp sense of humor about it.

Fair warning: some posts will be genuinely serious, because life is. But even the hard ones will sound like me, not like a press release. There will be misspellings, grammer errors and the thoughts will be random, because that is me.

If that sounds like your kind of honest, subscribe below. Free subscribers get a new essay every other week. Paid subscribers get a post every week, plus the deeper, bonus content that’s too unfiltered for the free feed.

Glad you’re here. Let’s go!

Emily