I really appreciated that at this Rose Café, the Rose community could come together and have a conservation about the experiences of people with disabilities—a subject that is often avoided or overlooked. I totally agreed with several students’ point that living with a disability becomes invisible because, often, explaining that you have a disability is met with stigmatizations or uninformed assumptions rather than understanding and conversation. These points made me consider that perhaps this stigmatization of disability is a symptom of broader American social norms that tend to find blame for a variety of circumstances—whether that be financial hardship, difficulty finishing a test during a given class period, or bouts of depression—and place it on the individual. Thus, rather than viewing that fact that some students get extended time to finish their tests as something that ensures that this student has an equal opportunity to succeed, people may falsely perceive this accommodation as signaling that this student has less competence or receives unfair treatment. I think that when an individual speaks out about having a disability, others, not recognizing what is contributing to these assumptions, may either falsely assume that this individual is not working hard enough to overcome their disability or start to view this individual as lesser. American society often seems to have sort of a pervasive inability to accept difference, and this inability to recognize that every single person has different hardships, experiences, aspects of self leads to a system of categorization that falsely stigmatizes some aspects of self or hardships as “abnormal.” This stigmatizing label, then, may contribute to this feeling that a disability is something that should be hidden, preventing conversations that could remove the stigma from taking place. Accordingly, I think that having conversations about disability like the one we had tonight and sort of creating awareness about the experiences of individuals with disabilities at Cornell and beyond during orientations or other events, as one student mentioned, could be a way of making it easier to have these conversations that deconstruct the stigma that fuels distance and allows false assumptions to persist.