Conversation with LeDerick Horne - Part III - "Dare to Dream"

Something Shiny: ADHD!

David and Isabelle continue their conversation with poet, speaker, and activist for people with disabilities, LeDerick Horne—from how the LD/ADHD community often generates it’s knowledge base from peers and social media, to losing resources by ignoring people, to recognizing that the suffering is real and the urge to help someone not suffer as you did has a big fancy psychology term for it (transmuting internalization, PHEW). Go further into the depth of how you’re not alone and also hear one of LeDerick’s incredible poems - Dare to Dream. (Part III of a series)
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LeDerick talks about a multimedia approached to activism, making a Youtube series on Celebrating Black History & People with Disabilities, and starting up a TikTok account (see links below)—and the importance of recognizing that for most people with disabilities, the information is transmitted peer to peer, rather than parent to child. At most of his events, he notices that parents are sitting on the sidelines, and the kids are interacting about the best apps to use for accommodations—we’re not going to read the book, access the study, but we can listen to a podcast. David jumps in about a shared oral history and the access to that oral history is geography—and now podcasts can overcome that. Given the history of segregation, and New Jersey being the 6th most segregated state in the nation, and living in a blue color, primarily black and Latinx community—you need to be able to cross over to other parts of town and communities to access information. Segregation cuts us off from resources, from information, and the power of having these conversations for everyone to be able to find out in the world. The power of sports or other activities to bring people together—he was able to meet folks that were not in special ed because he ran track and cross country. If he had just stayed in those classrooms, he wouldn’t have had access to them professionally. LeDerick was invited to Harvard, the UN, the White House—connecting to others with a shared passion and from all walks of life. LD/ADHD crosses all lines, and it’s important to recognize, and there is privilege that comes in there and makes the experience of being LD/ADHD so different. David names—when we’re talking about people in this world, whether the color of their skin, their neurodivergence, their gender—there isn’t one way to receive a message in this world. And there’s no way for a message to become universal, and it stretches, and we need to have these conversations more often, not just the right way. It’s important to honor choice and agency—and with LD and ADHD, we’re looking at exceptional people that are being missed. There are people who could be potentially curing major diseases, changing the world, we’re losing resources by ignoring people. LeDerick went to school with some folks who he looked up to intellectually, artistically, and who were in the same classrooms as him—and whether it was resources at home, luck—the story ended very differently. The three of us—LeDerick, David, and Isabelle—we’re the survivors, we’re the ones who made. As he takes his last breath, LeDerick wants to know he’s made the world a better place, so no one has to go through the same sort of suffering. David drops the transmuting internalization—it’s the quantum leap of psychology, you don’t want others to suffer as you do and you go back and try to the right the wrong that was done to you, for someone else. David doesn’t want people to suffer, but he wants people to suffer (not as a jerk)—but he is what he is because of what he suffered. But what are the right ways to suffer? There’s a lot of needless suffering. There’s a lot of bad returns on investment, so being able to right these wrongs, and wanting to correct something that’s wrong in the world, they can feel it, because they can tell that you’re not correcting them. This makes Isabelle thing of trauma mastery, and how we can be unconsciously drawn to scenarios and relationships that reenact the trauma we suffered because we want to rewrite the script this time. And also the difference between pain and suffering, and there’s some disease (leprosy or Hansen's disease) that numbs your ability to tell you’ve had an injury, so you keep going and keep going and this leads to infections and loss of fingers, etc. (See below)—the idea of pain as a messenger, as something that indicates you need to notice something so you can change it, versus suffering as feeling isolated and stuck in that pain and aloneness. Trauma work as requiring community, and connection and vulnerability, and how trauma can’t be healed in isolation. David loses his thought around how this connects to inclusion, and the three pause for an insert, and then he thinks of what he wanted to say! He pulls up the example of PTSD rates and how countries that are facing war, like Israel, might be assumed to have the highest rates of PTSD—and yet Israel has the lowest rate, which relates to how when people return from being in military service, everyone gets it (because it’s required and thus more commonly experienced). David is not listening to LeDerick and Isabelle’s story trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, they’re just listening and sharing and gaining that common experience. Trauma reenactments can be scary, and around inclusion, everyone can have an accommodation and individualized education. Who wouldn’t benefit from an individualized education plan? What if everyone had it and it’s not a weird thing. LeDerick talks about his friend Mark McLendon. He had an emotional breakdown in his early 20s, leaves a family event and lays down in the car, going through it. Through the glass, his friend Mark knocks, and he said “you know, I don’t exactly know what you’re going through right now, and I know in this world that has a lot of suffering, but none of us has to suffer alone.” There’s the idea of the dignity of failure, and there’s a desire to wrap kids in a protective bubbles, and it’s not treating you like a human being, we fall, we get our knees scraped, mistakes happen-you don’t want to be so fragile that when that happens you break. It’s important to go through the experience with words. David asks LeDerick if he could gift us with some poetry, and he graciously does, sharing the poem he wrote to high school kids: Dare to Dream. It’s incredible, please listen to it now! It speaks to 10 year old Isabelle, and David was sort of expecting poetry (womp womp) and instead he saw him grabbing his hand and getting him out, and then wow. He tried for 8 years to record LeDerick speaking this poem to no avail. LeDerick remembered going to a Dare to Dream conference out of the New Jersey Office of Special Education and Bob Haugh, was encouraging him to put to words the specific experience and communication to the kids at the conference, witnessing these panels--and like so many things, the specific became more general and resonant.

More on LeDerick Horne

(here's a brief bio)

(here's his amazing link tree)

LeDerick and Dr. Margo Izzo’s book, Empowering Students with Hidden Disabilities: A Path to Pride and Success

Black and Dyslexic Podcast (hosted by Winifred Winston and LeDerick Horne)