We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julia Betancourt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Julia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.
My parents are going to hold it over me that I’m even admitting this, so Mom and Dad, if you’re reading…don’t let this go to your heads.
My parents are both teachers, so from an early age, they always made sure that I had access to educational materials about whatever I wanted–books, educational video games, after-school activities. In the summer, I’d be excited for my parents to take me to museums. This didn’t always mean we had to spend money; sometimes we’d just borrow books from or sign up for free programs around the neighborhood. More than that, my parents tried to always teach me about subjects I was interested in while at home. As a kid, my dad would show me the practical applications of area problems we went over for my homework when I was playing video games where I designed buildings or he would would teach me about the Greek gods and then point out the references in everyday life, such as a nearby statue of Athena.
Through this emphasis on education, even when not from the classroom but from discussing the activities I liked and locations I was in, my parents impressed on me from an early age that anything in the world around me can be connected back, not just to my education, but to anything I want.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am disabled; my left arm stops just below the elbow. As a writer, I try to use personal experiences and storytelling to emphasize the human need for inclusion and acceptance. My writings are focused around disability, yes, and in doing so, I explore the ways that we include and exclude those who are different in our society. My writing has appeared in The Manifest-Station, The Mighty, ReadWorks, Immigrantly, and The Columbia Spectator, among other publications.
My writings are also heavily informed by the disability rights/justice activism that I do. Last summer, I was named to Diversability’s 2023 Disability Impact List for my activism. As an undergraduate, I was an inaugural peer mentor with the Barnard College’s Center for Accessibility Resources and Disability Services (CARDS) peer mentoring program. During my tenure as Alumnae Class of 2021 President, I helped establish the first Barnard Alumnae with Disabilities Reunion Reception and worked on the first-ever Columbia Disability Affinity Graduation. In 2022, I received my MSEd from CUNY City College, where I helped found the Alliance for Disability Inclusion, a committee to address issues of access for all people with disabilities on campus. I am also the youngest board member of the New York City Kids Project, which is dedicated to teaching elementary school students about inclusion of all people through puppetry.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Some of my earlier written pieces are about accepting myself and my place in society as a person who must answer every question about disability without any reservations. I wrote these pieces because they were how I made sense of the world at the time. However, when I go back and read the very first piece I ever published, an essay about my reactions to children asking about my arm, I cringe. My understanding of my disability has changed since then. Then, I was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high schooler who didn’t question why children obsessed over my arm. Now, I have a Master’s in the Science of Education (MSEd). While I do think that I made the right choice then, to answer their questions, and while I know that I would still do the same thing today, I also recognize that I have different, more complicated feelings after attending graduate school, and that maybe I don’t want to answer every question asked of me. I know consciously that I do not have to answer questions about how I lost my arm (all I will say is that it was a traumatic accident). However, this idea has been imposed on me since an early age, when complete strangers would demand to know and make me uncomfortable if I didn’t share. I sometimes feel awkward sharing details about my medical history, but have been conditioned to answer it, even when it made me uncomfortable and when my classmates would ask me just to watch me become uncomfortable telling this story. Truthfully, I am still in the process of unlearning this lesson, this idea that I must always answer this and any other question about disability I am asked. I recognize that I need to treat myself with kindness. However, this is one of the great things about writing: through writing, I am able to process these emotions and unpack why I am trying to unlearn this need to share every detail of my disability status. While I am still more than happy to speak and write about living with a disability and about disability justice, I also now try to set boundaries around my accident so that I do not have to share so much about something deeply personal. In doing so, I have found that not only does writing help me to better understand my relationship to that part of my history, but that I can process, understand, and illuminate for others some of the harm caused by these tiny moments of disability exclusion, in hopes that we can come together to create a more inclusive society.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Absolutely! Both my writing and disability activism, which support and rely on each other, are means of working towards a goal of a more inclusive, understanding society.
My writing is informed by my activism and vice versa. The lessons I learn through disability justice projects are lessons I share in my writing. Sometimes, I share the stories directly, such as in a recent piece where I spoke about the impact of language on our understanding of disability. Other times, these are more indirect, such as when I took my own experiences of student activism and fighting for an accessible bathroom and wrote a story for middle schoolers, “Rally for Access,” about speaking up for yourself and your rights. Similarly, I reflect on my experiences through my writing, and come to additional understandings of the world in which we all live, such as in memoir essay I wrote, “Phantom Towers, Phantom Limb: Feeling the Loss I Can’t Remember,” about growing up in New York City post-9/11 and growing up in the aftermath of an amputation. (This is also my favorite essay I’ve written and published; I’m really proud of it). Through each of these two aspects of my identity, I come to better understand why inclusion is so important, and how we can use stories to create a more inclusive society.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julesbeta/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-betancourt/