OWN IT
- Lewis Bartelle
- May 10
- 6 min read
THE POWER OF NAMING YOUR DISABILITY
Hey everyone, Lewis here — and I want to ask you something before we even get started.
When someone asks what’s wrong with your speech, what do you say?
Do you wave it off? Say “I had a stroke” and leave it there, hoping they stop asking? Maybe you mumble something about a medical thing and change the subject as fast as you can? I did all of that. For a long time, I was fluent in vague. I had a whole vocabulary built around not quite saying it — and I didn’t even realize it was costing me something every single time.
Then one day, I just said it plain.
I have dysarthria. I have ataxia. I have double vision.
And something shifted.
What Happens When You Name It
There is a thing that happens in the space between knowing something and saying it out loud. Knowing it keeps it inside you, where it can grow and mutate and take up way more room than it deserves. Saying it out loud — clearly, without apology, without a lowered voice — that does something different. It makes the thing real, yes. But it also makes you real in relation to it.
I stopped being a guy with “some speech stuff from the stroke.” I became a man with dysarthria — which is a neurological motor speech disorder, by the way, not a personality quirk, not nervousness, not something a glass of water fixes. I became a man with ataxia — which is why my hands do what they do, why my balance works the way it works, why some days are harder than others for reasons that have a name now. I became a man with double vision — which is why certain environments light me up like a pinball machine from the inside.
Naming those things didn’t defeat me. It freed me.
Here’s what I think is actually happening when we refuse to name our disabilities: we’re trying to protect ourselves from the weight of other people’s reactions. If I say it, they might look at me differently. If I say it, it becomes more real. If I say it, I’m admitting something.
But here’s what I know after 14 years on this road: the shame doesn’t live in the word. The shame lives in the silence around it. Every time you dance around your diagnosis, you’re sending yourself a message — this is too big, too ugly, too much to say plainly. And you deserve better than that message.
And let me tell you what was happening during all those years of vague vocabulary — I was apologizing. Constantly. Every conversation where my speech drew a look, a pause, a confused expression — sorry about that, I had a stroke, sorry, I know it’s hard to understand, sorry. Over and over. Like my voice was an inconvenience I was inflicting on people.
That went on for a while. And then one day I just decided to stop.
I decided to stop apologizing for something I have no control over. This is dysarthria. I live with it now. There is nothing anyone can do about it — it is what it is. It goes on the list with ataxia and double vision and post-stroke fatigue and everything else in that Unseen 80%. It has a name. It belongs to me. And I will not waste one more breath apologizing for it.
That was the shift. Not some big dramatic moment — just a quiet decision that enough was enough. The apologies were gone and something that felt a lot like dignity walked in to take their place.
Name it. Take the power back.
Own It — Name It — Move Through It
This is something I talk about a lot in the Army of Warriors community, and it applies here as directly as anywhere: you cannot move through something you won’t look at.
This isn’t just motivational talk — there’s real psychology behind it. When we acknowledge a stressor clearly and specifically, we activate the problem-solving parts of our brain instead of the threat-avoidance parts. Vague fear spreads. Named challenges get managed. The moment dysarthria became a word I said out loud, it stopped being this formless thing following me around and started being a condition I could research, explain to others, advocate around, and yes — even laugh about when the moment called for it.
Watch out, I talk funny: Dysarthria. That line is in my book. I put it there on purpose. Not because it’s a punchline — because it’s mine. I named it. I own it. It doesn’t own me.
The Unseen 80% — all those invisible symptoms that nobody sees when they look at you from across the room — gets heavier when you carry it unnamed. Post-stroke fatigue doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Neither does the cognitive fog, the word-finding delays, the sensory overload, the emotional dysregulation that catches you sideways on a random Tuesday. But when you name them, to yourself and to the people who need to understand — something lightens. Not because the symptoms change. Because you change in relation to them.
Warrior to Gladiator is exactly this. A Warrior survives. A Gladiator claims the arena. You can’t claim ground you’re pretending isn’t there.
The Picture on the Wall
There’s another piece of this I want to talk about — and it might be the most practical thing in this whole article.
Take a picture. Or find one from the beginning.
I am absolutely serious. One of the most powerful motivational tools available to any survivor costs you nothing and requires zero equipment beyond the phone already in your pocket. Go find the earliest image you have from your recovery — day one in the hospital, first week in rehab, first time back home. Wherever your starting line was. Look at that person.
Now look at where you are today.
That distance is real. That distance is yours. And on the days when recovery feels like it’s going nowhere, when The Long Middle has stretched so far you can’t see either end of it — that picture is proof. Not proof that you’re fixed. Proof that you are moving. Proof that the work is working even when you can’t feel it working.
I have a picture on the wall at Methodist Hospital now. I go back there with Stroke INSPIRE and I walk those halls that I once couldn’t walk, and I talk — with my dysarthria voice, out loud, unapologetically — to people who were where I was. That picture, that distance, that proof — it matters more than any pep talk I could give.
Your Victory Journal is built on this same idea. Every S.T.E.P.S. you log, every day you show up and write something down — that’s you building a record of distance covered. Month one versus month six. Page one versus page sixty. That’s not just journaling. That’s evidence. That’s the case you’re building against every voice that says nothing is changing.
Document the journey. Look back often. That’s the fuel.
A Declaration, Not a Defeat
I want to be clear about what owning your diagnosis is not.
It is not giving up. It is not reducing yourself to a label. It is not resigning yourself to a ceiling.
When I say I have dysarthria, I am not saying dysarthria is all I am. I am saying: this is part of my real life, I am not ashamed of it, and I am equipped to deal with it. There is a world of difference between I am broken and here is exactly what I am working with. One of those sentences has nowhere to go. The other one is a starting line.
The worst day of your life became the first day of the strongest version of yourself. That sentence only makes sense if you’re willing to look at what that day actually handed you — by name, out loud, in the light.
Name it. Own it. Move through it.
That’s the hustle.
That’s all I’ve got for today, Warriors — and I genuinely hope something in here landed for you. If you’ve been doing the vague dance around your own diagnosis, I want you to try something this week. Just say it. To yourself in the mirror if nobody else. Out loud. By name. See what it feels like on the other side of that sentence.
Then come tell us about it. The Beyond The Shatter Facebook community is exactly the place for that conversation — find us there and bring your whole honest story. And if you’re ready to go deeper on the identity and recovery work, the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting for you — always free, always yours.
The complete roadmap — every piece of this, start to finish — lives in Beyond Shattered on Amazon. If you’re navigating this without a guide, that book was written for you.
See you out there.
— Lewis
