Joanne Smith has a lifelong disability and chronic asthma but rejects the label "disabled." She credits staying active with improving her outlook and ability to handle pressure, and warns against letting diagnoses or external narratives dictate what you can do.
Top of all, how I feel, how I feel in myself is just so different and so good, and how I handle the pressure and how I handle life and how I handle everything, because we can't just sign up to brilliant life, happy experiences. But how I handle all of those things has improved so much too, as a result of basically remaining active despite, despite the, you know, Technically, I have been diagnosed with a lifelong disability. I don't refer to myself as that, but actually, under this country's criteria, then it does come under that category. So I've been told, which I didn't know that previously. I thought having asthma was bad enough, honestly. I suffer with asthma and I've suffered with that on and off all my life. And so, yeah, so we can all have various different issues. But the point being, my best way was just do what you can despite that. Don't let it change anything. Don't believe anything. Just know what you know and go with that, because the often unnecessarily— unnecessarily— unintentionally seeds can be planted in our minds that have us believing that whatever is gonna go a certain direction, this is what's gonna happen, and we don't know what the future's gonna bring.
