Adele, an employment professional from Georgia, shared the following after receiving the Interdependence Newsletter. The article detailed how the goal of "being independent" is imposed on people with disabilities, yet none of us are truly independent—we're all interdependent!

Well, my friend, you've done it once again. You blew me away! You've taken a big word used in the disability-industrial complex and made the complex minions look a little silly!! I have thought often about what you wrote and love that you wrote it.

The best thing about thinking about interdependence is that your article makes so much sense and you really do challenge people to think differently. I think you must have written about my latest bandwagon which is related to labels. Why do we have to refer to people with disabilities other than as people or individuals or young adults or whatever "ordinary" descriptor one might use. So, I spent an entire week going through every line of our job coach course (online) to remove words like client, customer, consumer, person with a disability, etc., except for a couple of places where a person had to be distinguished from others, and I couldn't figure out how to do it just yet. In the future, I'll try to fix those, too!

You made people think—love it. One of the things I'm beginning to believe is that we can change the way people behave by changing the way they think about language (independent vs. interdependent or person/individual vs. person with disability X, etc.). It all makes so much sense when you think about it. People are people, and every one of us needs assistance with something, and every one of us can provide assistance to someone else. So there!