Rewriting the Narrative with Sarah Tuberty, Part One: Within Ourselves
Updated: Mar 8, 2022
Sarah Tuberty joined us at Learn for Life to chat about her life experiences as an occupational therapist, flight attendant, aerialist, and advocate with a congenital limb difference. We were also joined by Able ARTS Work resident artist, Summer Mariotta. Learn about Sarah’s engagement with stigma through her professional, personal, and creative life in this two-part blog post. Read part two here.
Learn for Life [LFL]: Welcome Sarah! Thank you for being willing to join us today and have the opportunity to chat. To start off, would you tell us a bit about you?
Sarah: Hi, I’m Sarah. I was born with and have a congenital limb difference. My hand looks the way that it does due to an event that happened prior to my birth. I don’t know why or how that happened. The best research as of right now suggests that there was likely a blood clot or obstruction to my subclavian artery when I was eight weeks into development that just did not provide adequate blood supply to my arm as it was developing. So, the theory is that I never had fingers; my hand just didn’t develop them. Whereas other theories that I encountered early on in my life is that I had fingers and that something happened to them, that there was some type of injury in utero that then caused my hand to look the way that it does. I think that’s the important distinction as I’ve learned about disability, disability history and culture, and stigmas around disability is the concept that people are “supposed” to be born a specific way and thus there must have been something that stopped or injured that, versus, that somebody could be born with a disability and that just be the way that they are made. So, I think that’s important since that was the initial theory, the thought of “How can this be possible that she doesn’t have fingers to begin with?” and I’ve thought that a lot, even in college as I worked with different professors. Regardless, I beebopped along and I was an incredibly outgoing kid. I changed schools when I was in the third grade. I was the new girl in a pre-existing social structure in this smaller school and eight years old is when kids are really beginning to understand who they are and how they sense the world around them. Typically, children who do have differences at first will face this crisis at eight, so I encountered that crisis in addition to just being the new student at a new school. I became incredibly insecure and was very much ashamed of my hand for a long time. I would hide it and did not like talking about it. I did not like associating myself with it. I felt a lot of pressure to everyone around me that I was “normal”. I took on all of the internalized ableism. I went to graduate school in 2016 to become an Occupational Therapist and I really became introduced to disability themes and concepts and just felt so much of that experience is my experience. Then learning that there’s all of these people in the world that are ashamed of themselves because of disability. So a lot of the work and things I care about have really guided me and inputted me into positions where I want to help create positive messaging around disability. All of the things that allow us to express ourselves, so we can be able to be leaders in our own fields and organizations versus being dependent on what other people think is best. That’s what I care a lot about and have intentionally stopped hiding myself and have put myself on stage in the aerial arts world in using my disability to tell a story and narrative to really challenge what we think disability truly is and what we think disability can do. So that is sort of the big trends of what I care about.
LFL: Hearing you talk, you’ve done a lot that’s amazing and impactful. What inspired you to go into Occupational Therapy? You said that you weren’t sure about ableism and you didn’t know about positivity and the community until you got to college. So, what inspired you to start that journey?
Sarah: I was volunteering at a summer camp that was affiliated with the hospital I went to as a child. They have a summer camp specifically for kids with congenital limb differences called “Camp Winning Hands”. I had volunteered for the camp and started doing programming around that. There was this moment at camp where this teen was trying to figure out how to put up her hair on her own, but her arm anatomy made it a little bit difficult for her to bring her hair up back behind her head and navigate the ponytail holder. So, we sat down. I showed her how I do it and we went through several different strategies and I just thought that was the coolest thing. I then became introduced to Occupational Therapy through my volunteer work at Shriner’s Hospital where I was a patient, and that’s where I encountered the word “OT” [Occupational Therapy/Therapist] and I really liked it. So I come from a science background and I liked that it continued on through the sciences and that we were being creative. I liked that those were required aspects of the job and that we worked with people on the things they cared about. We helped them do what they wanted to do, and need to do throughout our lives. I felt that a lot of those qualities very much fell in line with what I care about.
LFL: OT is definitely a multifaceted profession. It seems like a fun, creative field. What’s one of your aspects of being an Occupational Therapist?
Sarah: Good Question. Very true story, I graduated and got my license March of 2020, so jobs really fell apart in that space and it has been tough to actually get a job as an OT. Right now, I am working per diem at Shriner’s Hospital in Philadelphia, but it’s only a couple days a month, which is tough. I'd like to be more of a full-time position, but I do know that on my clinical placements (and that was before Covid had happened) I really loved that my hand was a way to connect with people in a manner I had never experienced before. I a lot of my life, navigating jobs, I would have to explain myself or prove myself. Particularly in being a flight attendant, people look at me as if thinking how on earth can I keep them safe, and trying to assure them that I knew how to open the doors and put on the masks. So, there’s this extra layer of wanting to prove myself in conversations, but it came surprisingly really beautiful as a way that I can connect with people and that people were so much more willing to engage in a relationship and share their true thoughts and feelings. I was doing one of my clinical placements and there was a gentleman who needed to get a hip replacement and we worked together on adaptive strategies to make sure that he kept his hip precautions after the surgery. He gave me a big hug and was like: “You know what? I was afraid to tell my family that I needed this hip replacement because I didn’t want them to think less of me or want them to think that I’m getting old and disabled.”, particularly because his job has such a heavy stigma on strength and masculinity. I just thought that it was so cool that we could have that relationship together. We were able to explore that it’s okay to need support, but that doesn’t make us any less worthy.
LFL: That’s definitely a way to flip the narrative on the way people view disabilities. Would you say that your congenital hand difference has been beneficial to you as an Occupational Therapist?
Sarah: Yes, I would say so for that matter. There are, of course, challenges within a workplace setting, but I also think and truly believe that it’s important for disability communities and their members to be in places of leadership. So, the more healthcare providers that are also a part of the disability community is huge and will help transform how we understand and provide care. It becomes less of an “us versus them” and more about how we are all helping each other. I am definitely a huge advocate for wanting to get more people with disabilities everywhere.