The Art Of Honesty And Communication by Lisa Cesal, Self Advocate and Author

The Art of Honesty and Communication

By: Lisa Cesal, Author & Self Advocate

I am a person with a disability who has been in several different kind of relationships.  Ninety percent of the time relationships break down because of two reasons. These would be communication and honesty.    

When two people have a conversation between male and females they can interpret things differently.  It's even harder when you are dealing with people with disabilities.  The reason for this is that some are socially awkward when dealing with their feelings and emotions. This is due to most people with disabilities having limited experience in social settings and relationships. 

In my experience it's very difficult for me to communicate feelings that I would like to because I do not want to hurt any one's feelings.  This can cause confusion about the status of what type of relationship I am in.  This has happened to me recently as I lost a close friend due to miscommunication and not being open and honest and telling the other person how I really felt.  

This all happened because I was assumed the person I was hanging out with thought we were just friends but he thought we were dating.  Once he found that he was in the "friend zone" he took it very hard and basically stopped speaking to me.  This could have been easily avoided if one of us would have just simply clarified the situation.  In retrospect I should handled it differently.  I should have made it clear that we were friends and always   would be without a chance of becoming more.  But I failed to do that because I did not want to hurt his feelings and did not communicate properly and I gave him mixed signals.  

So, in the future I will try and learn from this and help others not to make the same mistakes I did as being open and honest is the best policy. 

By Lisa Cesal 
Author, Self Advocate, IL Imagines Chicago Team Member
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Check out Lisa's book co-authored with Chris Lenart titled: They Said We Couldn't

Check out Lisa's and Chris's Youtube Channel where they post 2 videos a week rasing disability awareness and how people with disabilities positively contribute to society.