The LinkedIn podcast network is sponsored by Mercedes-Benz and the all-new,

all-electric eSprinter for the latest trendsetters who think forward for

groundbreakers and craft makers for all of you achievers.

Experience the all-new, all-electric eSprinter. Visit mbvans.com for details.

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel and this is Hello Monday.

It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us.

Today's guest is author Elsa Hunison. She writes an edit speculative fiction and two years

ago she won a Hugo Award. That's the most prestigious award in science fiction.

It's pretty badass. Well now Elsa has published a memoir. It's beautiful prose that attempts

to capture her experience coming of age as a deaf blind woman and it's amazing. It'll make

you question everything you assume about what it means to live with a disability. That's

pretty much the point. Her book's called Being Seen. One deaf blind woman's fight to end

ableism. Elsa's been deaf blind since birth. That tends to conjure up one image for a lot of

non-disabled people. Come on, who are you thinking of? Helen Keller? Early on in her school life,

a creepy classmate wrote an essay comparing her to Helen Keller. It was a bad essay and a terrible

comparison. Elsa's experience of her blindness and her deafness is her own. She is outspoken,

adventurous and extremely capable and she's been that way her entire life. Elsa doesn't want

non-disabled people to pretend disability doesn't exist. She wants disabled people to be welcome

in the world and to be received with warmth and accommodation instead of fear and rejection.

Here's Elsa. I seem to stir things up wherever I go. Literally existing as a deaf blind person out

in the world becomes controversy. Having a visible disability in public is civil disobedience.

Every time I show up for a work event or to teach in a second grade classroom about what it's

...