SPIRALING UP INSIGHT SHORT: "From Pitying to Empowering"

I had an injury back in 2002 which left me paralyzed from the neck down. And overnight I went from being 6 foot 3 to 3 foot 6 in a wheelchair. I was sitting in the rehab facility and I saw my legs for the first time with pretty much no muscles on them, and they were really skinny. And I remember crying and then thinking after that, I was lying in bed that night and saying, okay, well, look, this is who I am now, but I need to get on with life. The Irish are fairly positive about things, but we have a saying which is quite common here, which is when someone asks you, how you doing? They say, I'm not too bad, which is a negative way of saying something positive. And I just think in the disability space in particular, it's always so. Things are often shaped in the negative way or poor this, poor that. It's terrible, it's this, it's that. But I believe that there's solutions to many of these problems with the right will and determination. And I often reflect, if this accident hadn't happened to me, I probably still wouldn't. My eyes still mightn't have been opened up to those challenges that those billions of people face. So I think that new perspective, that situation I was thrown into is something that has given me this drive and this passion, using what I think I would have had before that determination and that passion to try to do something good in the world.