You know, LD Online was a revelation for me in my journey. It was the only place where I, David Cole, cofounder of Eye to Eye, David Cole, could find a different story about ourselves.

You know, we all heard the story that we were messed up, that our brains were a problem. And it was near impossible to find a story that was different from that. But Dave and I, we found it on LD Online. We found affirmation for what we believed. We found language to articulate what we felt. We found community and connection with a growing movement and community of people challenging that deficit model and groping their way forward to a neurodiversity framework.

And it’s not an exaggeration to say that Learning Outside the Lines, the book that David Cole and I wrote as undergraduates at Brown, which was published a month after we graduated from Brown and has been in contiguous print for 22 years now, it’s 40th printing, would never have happened without that resource, that community.

And it’s fair to say that Eye to Eye, which David Flink has heroically, selflessly made real in the world around the country, wouldn’t happened either because both of those things were a leap of faith that different isn’t deficit. And it was a leap of faith because what we were hearing was different is deficient, but that’s not what we heard on LD Online. 

And that was transformative. Transformative to me, transformative to Dave, and I know transformative to the world at that time, and I know will continue to be so in the future.

For more information about learning disabilities, please visit LDOnLine.org. This video was made possible by a partnership between the National Education Association and WETA.