I grew up with an undiagnosed birth related brain injury. At school I was often teased as I was uncoordinated and slow. It was the first day of Grade 8 when I was told that I would be put back a grade. I was taken away from my friends and from familiar surroundings and placed in a school that had a special education class. 
 

In self defense, I was emotionally numb until a teacher inadvertently broke into my frozen world. My teacher, a priest and former bomber pilot during World War II, made a crude comment about divorced women. I was so blazingly angry that I walked out and refused to attend his class. He eventually apologized. I received the highest grade in the class.

This experience broke my shell and revealed a whole new side to my personality. I never learned how to write in an organized fashion following accepted standards, or how to socialize with my peers, but I discovered that I had intelligence, attitude and an ability to communicate. The result was my grades jumped dramatically.

Upon entering university and living alone for the first time, I sought to understand the cause of puzzling personal and academic challenges. I had feared mental illness and explored this with a psychiatrist in a clinic. I was referred to a neurologist who diagnosed me with a birth related brain injury.

I was initially refused any rehabilitation because it was thought that I was too old to benefit from it. I struggled for many years to open this door. Years later, as the university was unsupportive, I found myself forced to take day programs at a brain injury rehabilitation center in order to get disability related home and academic services. I went through all of the programs at all of the centers and attended university. This went on until my funding was cut as a result of changes in government rules. As a result, I faced both eviction and the loss of my education. I was scared.

When I returned to school I had neither the kind of assistance I needed to understand the nature of my disability nor to accommodate it. I did well in some classes, but in other classes my grades were poor and relationships with professors problematic, often because a lack of academic accommodations to compensate for visual-spatial deficits and disorganization.

I nonetheless graduated with a BA in Anthropology with almost the GPA necessary to enter graduate school.  After upgrading I applied to a Master’s program. When I was accepted I was not as scared as should have been. I did not realize how poorly equipped the university was to address the needs of a graduate student with a disability. I found it frustrating that many professors could not grasp that someone who was disabled could be intelligent and articulate.

At the time, the mandate of the University Disability Resource Center (DRC) was solely to support undergraduate students with disabilities. I was told that the government considered graduate studies a luxury but funded undergraduate programs because these were considered vocational training (this is in writing!).

With my type of learning related needs, I needed and was eligible for funding for a laptop computer (as my hands are impacted), an academic strategist (as my organizational abilities are impacted) and a computer tutor (as my brain injury made learning professional planning software difficult). There was a program that would have funded this equipment and services. All I needed was two signatures, but it took from 1999-2003 to obtain these.

I was finally allowed to complete my Master's degree. This was one of the greatest achievements of my life, but it is also a source of my greatest pain. I thought I had my ticket to financial freedom. I couldn’t find a job though. What a let down.

I am now living in poverty and in a strange sense of limbo. I have worked so hard, but I am left with nothing but a student loan. I am living in a subsidized apartment among people who have nothing in common but their poverty. The stench of hopelessness is overwhelming. I had hoped for better. Now I am living without hope.