On Reinforcement & Practice
Disability and Determination is a weekly newsletter about my experience living with a rare disability…with a little bit of meditation, pop culture, and other random things thrown in. If you like this post, give me a like with the ❤️ symbol below. This will help me get discovered by others on Substack. Drop your email in the field at the bottom and click the Subscribe button to be notified of future posts (I offer a free and a paid subscription option)!
This past weekend I watched a lovely documentary on Netflix about the public television show Reading Rainbow. Along with the Scholastic Book Fairs, I loved Reading Rainbow growing up. LeVar Burton is a true national treasure. It reinforced my love of books and was truly special in its choice to feature kids giving book reviews. It really was a show by kids for kids, with some very necessary adult wisdom thrown in. Through books, it conveyed a message of love, learning, and acceptance.
Watching it, I got to thinking about all of the themes it reinforced. The show’s creator mentioned she wanted to represent all kids on the show which unfortunately fell short of representing disabled kids. That being said, I still very much felt spoken to when kids who were seen as “different” were represented. That feeling of understanding would have been hugely multiplied though, had I seen someone like me in an episode.
The show reinforced self-esteem, dealing with hard things, not letting anyone tell you who to be or not to be, that everyone deserves to be loved, that every story is important. A lot the things it focused on are things I struggle with as an adult. So how it is that I grew up watching a show like Reading Rainbow, at a time when I was most able to absorb things like what it taught, and still ended up as a self-conscious, not very resilient adult who has a hard time dealing with hard things and feeling like I deserve to be loved?
I’m not a psychologist by any means but for me, I think it was the lack of reinforcement. Even as a kid, you can’t just watch something once and expect it to alter your being and personality. Those themes have to be reinforced over and over again. And unfortunately, out in the world, where I lived…those ideas weren’t reinforced. I would have had to watch the show over and over again every single day for it to totally alter the way I felt about myself or dealt with things, and even then, that may not have been enough. I would have needed the reinforcement at school, in the things I read everyday. I had some great friendships, but I also got sent the message sometimes that I wasn’t worth hanging out with or being friends with. These things all added up, making it harder for the lessons I learned through various avenues like Reading Rainbow to get through to me.
This is something I’ve come to realize is true as an adult too. I’m a sucker for a good self-help book (though not as much anymore). But my expectation is that I’ll read it once and then it’ll somehow miraculously make me feel better or fix how I approach the world or myself. I won’t go back and read the book either because it feels like too much work. Then I inevitably get upset because reading said book didn’t have the outcome I expected.
As an adult, it’s even harder for certain things to get through because we’ve been through so much. There are so many experiences, traumas, joys, disappointments that shape our thinking and patterns. So if as a kid things couldn’t get through without reinforcement, I definitely can’t expect them to as a thirty-something. I have to keep reading the things that help me over and over. I have to keep meditating. I have to keep repeating and exploring things that give me confidence and remind me of how lovable I am.
Practice - It’s a word so commonly associated with sports or playing an instrument, but it’s instrumental in helping us reinforce the most positive ideas and feelings about ourselves too. You can’t just expect it to turn on like a light switch (like I have for so many years). Oh how I wish it was that easy. There’s already so much bad stuff in the world, I wish we could just read a singular book or hear an inspiring speech and that would be the key and we’d never feel bad about ourselves again. I wish the world and other people wouldn’t get in the way sometimes. That the messages we grew up weren’t something we had to practice and work hard to overcome.
It takes work and it takes practice. I’m working on being more intentional and putting the effort in for that practice and reinforcing all those positive things LeVar and the kids on the show taught me growing up. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or an adult…it’s never too late. But you don’t have to take my word for it…
For all you 80s and 90s kids, here’s the Reading Rainbow opening that you hopefully remember as vividly as I do:
What Made Me Happy This Week 🌞💞
Medgar & Myrlie by Joy-Ann Reid (📚) - I saw this in the New Releases section at the library and it immediately piqued my interest. Medgar Evers was the first civil rights activist to be assassinated, before Malcolm X and before Martin Luther King, Jr. I knew only the littlest bit about him before I read this book. What I particularly loved about it is that it tells Medgar’s story so beautifully and poetically, but it doesn’t stop there. It talks about the importance of his wife, Myrlie in his life as the person he loved and then as the person who would carry on his legacy and kept fighting for justice and equality.
- shared an interview she did for the unfixed podcast and it’s not just incredibly smart and funny, it’s incredibly vulnerable too. This is the paragraph that really stuck out to me too:
And so you get into an adversarial relationship with your body. And with your brain and with the way you think about the condition and you're angry at it all the time and you're like, This sucks and fuck, you know—I don't know, do you guys swear on this podcast? I don't know how many readers write into me going, you know, Fuck this epilepsy and I didn't for this and I didn't ask for this judgment and I didn't ask for this, you know, 100 seizures a day or a week or, because epilepsy presents in over 40 different fashions. So there's no one way that you're going to have a seizure. And often the way that it's represented in the media is actually the way that I do have it. But it can represent, it can manifest in so many ways.
Writing this and watching the documentary brought back memories of another children’s show I loved called Zoobilee Zoo. I remember watching it in my grandma’s den when we’d go and stay with her during the summer. One that, looking back, was slightly more terrifying but had just as catchy of a theme song! Also starring another national treasure…Ben Vereen. In case you forgot…
Oh my goodness, thank you for including me! I'm so honored. These interviews can make a person feel terribly vulnerable but Kim was wonderful, and what's needed more than ever in the disability and epilepsy community is greater cultural visibility--so that we can feel less alone and more at home in the world and in our skins :) I loved Reading Rainbow and LaVar is a national treasure--I definitely need to watch that doc!
I vaguely remember Reading Rainbow. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Sesame Street were the shows I remember and the ones I remember watching. But I do kinda remember the RR theme song. Never heard of that other one, though. LOL And I was ALL OVER those Scholastic Books like white on rice. I doubt they're doing that in schools anymore these days. In the sales biz, I've heard that we have to see it/read it 7 times before it's absorbed. So. There's that.