This is my last issue as Access Press editor. I’ve had various editing roles here since 2008, so it is quite a transition. I’ll assist our new editor, Joey Carlson, with the January issue.

I cannot begin to count and thank everyone I have worked with in Minnesota’s disability community. I’ll miss you all. My ask is that you continue to work with Joey and Heidi Holste, our new executive director, and our other staff and contractors and our board.

Newspapers and online news organizations need your support, now more than ever. Our board president, Lynda Milne, wrote about that in November. I won’t repeat what she said but frankly, it’s daunting. We have lost too many news outlets. We cannot lose any more.

My ties to Access Press go back beyond working here. Years ago, I was part of the Neighborhood and Community Press Association (NCPA). NCPA volunteers worked with our founding editor, Charlie Smith, to transition Access Press from for-profit to nonprofit status.

I was pleased to join Access Press years later.

Looking back, I’m glad to have played a small role in changing attitudes toward and coverage of people with disabilities and our issues. Years ago Access Press was an outlier in terms of coverage. We focused on policy issues while my journalistic peers cranked out pity stories and inspiration porn.

Our community members are not show animals. We’re not your “there but for the grace of God go I” stereotypes. And please cut out the pity.

Remember, one fall on the ice, one accident, one illness and you are welcomed to our club!

Stereotypes persist. On an ADA anniversary during the pandemic, I was contacted by a Twin Cities television reporter. He wanted to include Access Press in an ADA story.

Footage of me could safely be shot in a park. Perhaps I could be pictured in my wheelchair?

“I don’t use a wheelchair,” was my response. “I live with several disabilities but my mobility is pretty good at this time of year.”

That quickly changed the conversation to don’t call us, we’ll call you, television is visual blah blah. I was not interviewed for the story.

There’s a lot of ambivalence in stepping back as editor, in unrealized aspirations that many of us disabled folks have. I live with six disabilities, including clinical depression, visual issues and being an adult on the autism spectrum. I didn’t know about the latter diagnosis until adulthood. Years ago, you were just considered to be weird.

Early in my career, I hoped to work for larger newspapers. I’ve never made my disabilities a secret. Instead of being viewed as brave and inspiring and held up as a role model, I as a potential employee with disabilities was viewed as a liability.

I’m glad younger disabled people are able to find meaningful employment that in many cases pays well. But for many of my generation that wasn’t the case.

People have said, why didn’t you sue? I’m 67 years old. In my early career I didn’t have the ADA protections workers have now. And finding an attorney on a $250 per week newspaper reporter salary was impossible.

My work is solid in decades as a journalist. But my story is like many of my disability community peers, of never getting a chance to move beyond a certain level. It’s beyond frustrating. It’s the constant feeling of being left out, of not being part of some elite club.

I’m not the press my nose against the glass and look longingly inside type. I’d be more inclined to throw a rock through the glass. It’s been hard to be left out.

That’s the past and at my age, apologies just sound like excuses. My first newspaper bylines appeared at age 12. This has been and will be my life as I will continue contributing here and to several other publications.

So here’s some advice for our readers as I step back:

• Stay informed. News, including disability-focused news, is more fragmented than ever. It’s difficult and yes, depressing, to keep up. But in the face of sweeping and often harmful changes, lives in our community depend on staying informed.
• Support the news organizations that keep you informed, including Access Press.
• Stay active. Squeaky wheels do get greased.
• Advocate for yourself, your peers and your family members. Don’t let others control your stories and your lives.
• Take care of each other. Keep fighting.

And thanks and goodbye.