Our world is built with stories.

Sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other.

The liturgous podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart.

Today's story, disability, is inherently negative.

Welcome to the liturgous podcast, everybody.

On today's episode, Dr. Hillary McBride is interviewing Heather McCain, a well-known respected speaker, advocate, educator, and activist,

working with a variety of companies, cities, and nonprofits to confront the issues that face disabled people.

Heather, it's so good to be sitting across from you, especially after all of our emails back in the morning.

We've been talking even about the language of what we titled the episode.

But for me, for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, how you came to do this work, what would be helpful for us to know about you, just to understand your perspective and the insight that you bring?

Sure. So I've had disabilities throughout my entire life, but for a large portion, I didn't recognize them as such.

I had mental health issues in high school, but didn't realize what disability was or, you know, kind of how to label it.

And at the age of 17, my body just kind of broke down.

And for a good five years, I didn't leave my house and less for medical appointments as I tried to sort out what it was that was going on in my body.

When I started to begin to get answers, I started using a power wheelchair.

And I tried using transportation where I lived, which was Maple Ridge.

And the buses came once an hour and the bus drivers half the time would lie and say that the ramps weren't operating because they just didn't want to deal with the time that it took to get the ramp down and to load me on, which was, as you can imagine, a big inconvenience to my life is, it was particularly frustrating because I had spent so long isolated that I felt like this power chair was my freedom.

And then to have gatekeepers who stopped me from accessing the world was quite difficult.

And I wrote letter after letter to TransLink with no response.

And I was running a chronic pain support group in Maple Ridge at the time and decided to look into organizations who could support me and couldn't find any.

So I appointed some of the chronic pain club members as a board and set up my own.

And I called it citizens for accessible neighborhoods.

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