Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

where disability stories spark change

Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability is a health podcast hosted by Meriah Nichols, with 78 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Meriah Nichols hosts Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability, a health show with 78 episodes published.

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  Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

  Updated: The Disability Pride Flag

  Jun 23, 20269 min

  the disability pride flag: what it represents, who it's for

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  Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

  Navigating the Down Syndrome Transition Plan: An Interview with the Authors

  Nov 2, 202532 min

  In this conversation, Jo Ann and Stephanie Meredith talk about their newly updated handbook that helps families in the Down syndrome community navigate the transition to adulthood. Originally written by Jo Ann and now refreshed with Stephanie’s insight, the book offers guidance for families moving from school-age supports into adult life, a stage that can feel overwhelming at times. They share what inspired the handbook, offer practical advice for planning the transition, and discuss topics like building self-determination, finding inclusive work and housing, staying involved in the community, understanding guardianship, and managing long-term health. The handbook highlights that every family’s path is unique, filled with its own possibilities and choices. Best of all, it’s available for free as a “living document,” updated regularly based on feedback from the community it serves.

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  Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

  Jose Rosario, Cool Cat; Voice from the Disability Community

  Aug 9, 2025—

  This is an interview with Jose Rosario, a bad ass activist, mental health therapist, super smart and fun guy who has somehow never watched Star Trek. It is a part of the Cool Cats: Voices from the Disability Community series, in which Meriah interviews cool people from the disability community so you can get to know them. Jose's "Short" Bio Born to young Puerto Rican parents, José Rosario developed Cerebral Palsy as a premature baby. His family's journey towards equity deeply impacted his mental health. Currently nearing his PhD in Clinical Psychology, his research focuses on cultural trauma in intersectional communities. He is an Interdisciplinary Minority Fellow for the American Psychological Association, member of the Congressional Diversity and Equality Advisory Board for Congressman James Langevin, and member of the Rhode Island Attorney General Community Advisory Board. He has been honored with the Chris Martin Humanitarian Award and the Victoria Lederberg Award for Excellence in Psychology. José is a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator helping business, nonprofits, and educational institutions to understand and implement identity-inclusive mental health protocols and culturally aware community healing. https://youtu.be/_ZgoUvAopKg An Interview with Jose Rosario, Cool Cat Meriah: [00:00:00] Okay. Welcome Jose. Thank you so much for joining me here on Unpacking Disability and, the Cool Cat Voices from the Disability Community Series where we try to. bring disability community together and introduce cool people from the cross-disability community of which you are definitely one. And thank you so much for being here. Jose: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad that we have a space to also show people with disabilities is not one note characters. We are complex. Meriah: Oh, absolutely. I'm wondering if you can take a minute to introduce yourself. Jose: Sure. Who am I? That's a great question. I am a speaker. I'm an activist. I'm also a therapist. I'm mental health therapist, and I'm a researcher. All of my work is about intersectional violence and how intersectional communities, queer bipoc folks, [00:01:00] queer, disabled folks react to violence and engage in healing. And so, I'm often thinking. About how folks are experiencing harm from various directions. And we don't just cower in fear. There are ways in which we pick ourselves up as a community and move forward. And so, wanting to bring that to light and support and affirm that as much as I can. Meriah: Wow. Thank you. There's so much I want to talk to you about. Yeah. So much. One of the things about the Cool Cat series is as I started this a long time ago,and I ask the same set of questions to everybody. And the point of that is really to emphasize the difference in our answers and how we are so very different. Like we're all coming to this with a lived experience and disability and we're so diverse. I think that's part of the beauty of everyone answering the same set of questions. Diving into those questions, [00:02:00] I am wondering what is your connection with disability? Jose: Oh, such an intimate connection, right? I have been disabled my entire life, and I recognize that disability is the one identity where it can happen anytime in your lifespan. So, all I know is my experience as a disabled person. I was born premature. A couple of months into birth, I stopped breathing and, acquired some brain damage, which led to my CP diagnosis. And so being in a wheelchair using canes like this has been a huge part of me. And I think for a long time there was this. Tension, right? The sort of like, why me aspect to this? Why am I different? What did I do? Why did I have to be this way? And I have very fortunately swung on the other side of the pendulum and been like, you know what? The way that I have to access the world, the way that I have to go into a space and be like,

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  Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

  This is YOUR DISABILITY STORY: What Do You Want it To Say?

  Jul 14, 20257 minS1

  Choice is the most powerful tool a human being has. This is an essay about the stories we tell, the choices we make, and the experience of disability

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  Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability

  Why Do We Need to Feel Disability Pride?

  Jul 13, 20258 min

  This is an answer to a question posed, "why do I need to feel pride in my disability? Isn't it enough that I accept my disability?" It will talk about disability pride, models of disability, sparkle sauce and glitter juice. You can watch me read the essay below, or listen on the podcast (it has been edited, but was originally published in July of 2022) Watch the Podcast Video of "Why Do We Need to Feel Pride in Our Disability" here: https://youtu.be/2Rlmm4FSCZc square pegs in a round hole world Listen to me read this by clicking the player below. Why Do We Need to Feel Disability Pride? Why do we need to feel disability pride at all? Doesn’t that feel slightly masochistic, feeling pride in something that has given us grief in our life? Feel pride over something that essentially “isn’t working” from a mainstream cultural perspective. As a friend said on Facebook, “isn’t it enough that I accept it? Why do I need to feel pride over it?” “Isn’t it enough that I accept it? Why do I need to feel pride over it?” Brene Brown wrote in Atlas of The Heart that pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts. This is authentic pride, it’s positive and can be felt for ourselves and/or others. “I can feel proud of myself, proud of you, proud of us.” Pride is an emotional response or attitude to something with an intimate connection to oneself, due to its perceived value. Oxford defines it as "the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's own importance." Wikipedia Hubris, on the other hand, is “an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments.” It’s the negative piece that usually flavors the word, “pride,” and is not actually part of pride at all. To me, there are two things going on with using “pride” in connection with disability: there is the definition of pride itself and the negative taste it can leave in our mouths. And there is the confusion over feeling like we must feel pride over something that may have simply been something difficult for us in our lives. The Feelings Associated with Disability The feelings that we tend to feel growing up with disabilities are shame (feeling flawed, unworthy of love, belonging, connection), guilt (feelings of what we’ve done or failed to do, putting others out, been an inconvenience), humiliation (feeling belittled and put down), and embarrassment (feeling that we’ve done something that has made us uncomfortable, but is a fleeting and relatable experience). These feelings plug in to the medical model of disability (that disability needs to be fixed), and they make perfect sense when viewed through that lens. We feel guilt our families have to go out of their ways to accommodate us, guilt that everyone in our class must wait, bored, while the teacher tries to figure out how to enable the closed captions in our Zoom session. We feel shame in who we are when we see ourselves through the lens of the medical model, that we need to be fixed, made “well”, that our edges of our square pegs need to be shaved off to fit in the round holes of the world. Read: Square Pegs in a Round Peg WorldThe power of the neurodivergent The Social Model of Disability The social model of disability, however, sees disability as a natural and normal part of the human experience. From the social model of disability, it’s the culture that we live in that’s the problem, and culture can be changed. Culture is a living expression, it’s fluid, it can transform. Shaving off our square pegs to fit in the round holes of the world, a’la Medical Model of Disability, is a travesty from the viewpoint of the Social Model of Disability, as it removes all juju, the mojo, the good sauce that disability brings with it. It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner hose, sucking up the glitter that also makes up disability.

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