Matthew, from Ottawa, ON, Canada, joined the Human Library in September 2020 after an acquaintance had posted about the organization on social media. The slogan, unjudge someone, spoke to Matthew, who already loves public speaking and believes in showing people that everybody has something they’ve struggled with. “I thought, this is so everything that I’m about, and the more I learned about it, the more I thought, OK, I want to do this too.”

He regularly publishes online with two different topics – Disabled and gay.

Matthew’s Journey

Joining in the Covid year of 2020, the online version of the Human Library fit perfectly into Matthew’s life. “
I’m housebound at the moment, so I haven’t gone anywhere in a couple of years.” he says, “That’s one of the biggest things that drew me to the Human Library, that you could do it at home.
 But I hope to someday do an in-person event.”

It is Matthew’s mixture of physical and neurodevelopmental disabilities that keep him at home in Ottawa, something he often talks about when publishing his “Disabled” book.

“I’m autistic, and I have some learning disabilities. I also have really extreme sensory overload and a lot of anxiety, so that’s why I have a hard time going out. 
And then I also have a chronic condition called polycythemia, which is where my body makes too much haemoglobin and too many red blood cells.” Matthew explains during our hour-long video call interview. Polycythemia is a chronic blood disease, requiring weekly draining of the blood and replacing it with IV fluids – Something Matthew has had to learn to do on his own at home. “Unless I want to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars a week, nobody in Canada can come to my house and do it. 
And the scary thing is that you die of a giant blood clot in your body without that treatment.”

Matthew’s readers have the opportunity to learn how the intersection between neurodevelopmental differences and physical disabilities creates serious roadblocks in receiving treatment for either. “I’m intensively trying to develop the ability to go out and do things, but it’s very slow-moving. I’d be making more progress with the sensory issues and the nervousness about going out
if I had a more stable foundation to work from, I think it would make a huge difference.”

Coming out, Family and Unforeseen Acceptance

His other topic, gay, is also frequently published online and naturally leads to some very different questions. “It’s a lot of questions about my family. Were they accepting or supportive? What were they like? 
I had a tough childhood, but none of it had to do with my family. My home life was better than anybody else that I know to be totally honest. 
But my school life and everything else was the hard part.” he shares. 

While his parents and siblings were unsurprised by Matthew coming out at age 16, he often shares a story of his grandmother during readings. “No one wanted to tell my grandmother because she was French Canadian, from a small town in New Brunswick, where she wasn’t even allowed to talk to anybody who wasn’t Catholic,” he says, explaining how his grandmother once told Matthew’s mother that there was a nice girl for him at her bingo nights. “And my mom said, I don’t think he wants to meet a nice girl from the bingo. And then my grandmother said, oh, does he want to meet a nice boy from the bingo? And my mom said, yeah, I think he’d much rather do that instead.”

His grandmother’s reaction was strong – but unexpected – “My grandmother lost her mind and started yelling at my mom. 
But she was yelling, ‘you better love him’, ‘that’s the way God made him’, ‘if you won’t accept him, he can come be gay at my house and live with me’. She was just amazing, and nobody saw that coming.”

Discovering Acceptance and Community in the Human Library

Acceptance, support and community are some of the things that Matthew has found within the Human Library. He tells a story of the first time he came to this realization, triggered by going into an event on a tough day. “I was having a really bad, overwhelming sensory overload day, and I thought, I just need to look OK. And then this thought popped into my head
that was like, no, you don’t. You’re here to be yourself. If you freak out, it’s gonna be all right. These are the kind of people you can be like this around.
 I just started feeling like I’m going to bawl my eyes out because of this feeling of not having to pretend to have it all together or to be OK.”

He smiles brightly through the video call, obviously touched by retelling this realization, which was followed up one year later when Matthew experienced going into a panic attack during a reading. “I remember making it through the end of that, going into the break room and expecting the librarians to say, you’ve got to do it anyway because that’s what my life has always been. 
But they said, do you want to leave? Can we get you anything? 
Do you want to talk to the therapist? 
Is there anything we can do?” he shares, “I just needed a minute to calm down, then went and did the second reading. Afterwards, three of the session organizers wrote me to make sure I was OK, and that was probably the most amazing feeling ever, it was just this real acceptance.”

“To get to experience that level of acceptance in a really hard moment and at an internal level within the Human Library was amazing because it showed that actually, this model and this slogan, it comes from the core and radiates out”, Matthew says.

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Dwelve into the story of our previous Book of the Month: Amputee.

The post Book of the Month: Disabled and Gay appeared first on The Human Library Organization.

Our Human Library Book of the Month is a series of portraits of our books created with the purpose of offering our readers a chance to understand the diversity and variety within our bookshelves around the world. It also provides unique insights into the motivations and values of being a book and volunteering for our organization.

The care system might not be an easy thing to talk about, but Paris almost makes it look like it is. She is such a great speaker – with warmth in her voice, a charming London accent, and obvious experience as a public speaker. Paris’ story, on the surface, is about the care system: how she got into it, what her experience was like, and how it is affecting her to this day. Mostly, however, her story is about making a life for herself despite all that happened and how to get something positive out of what she has experienced in the system. She accomplishes this through her job as a motivational speaker, but also through being a book at the Human Library.

The Care System

Paris went into the foster system when she was six years old. “I was at school, and my teacher at the time said that she wanted to speak to me after school and that some people wanted to meet me. These were people from an organization called NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They explained that I was not going to go back home and that I needed to come with them.”

Paris was first taken to a hospital: “I was going to school in the middle of summer with long trousers, cardigans on and thick roller necks. The teachers knew that something was not quite right. But they were not sure, so the NSPCC, when they saw me, immediately realized that I was covered in bruises, cuts, burn marks, all sorts of horrible scars, things that had healed over time. They were concerned that there might be some internal damage.”

After two weeks, Paris was released from the hospital and went to an assessment centre. As the youngest child in the centre by far, she was treated well, but the carers lacked knowledge about raising a black child: “They did not have much clue about a black child with afro hair and black skin, so one of my earlier memories is them trying to wash my hair in the kitchen over a bowl of some sort and my hair was just all tangled. They couldn’t brush it and did not know what to do with it, so they just shaved it all off. I was teased and bullied, and that was really hard because I was so young and already so confused and upset about being in care.”

Unfortunately, her bad experiences did not end there. As her mother got sentenced to prison for four years, she went into the care system. She joined her first foster family just before she turned eight years old but soon left the family as she was bullied by one of the other children there. What followed was a slew of breakdowns of families and back and forths of different homes until she finally left the care system and got her own flat right before her 18th birthday. She knew what she wanted to do with her life then: “I was fed up and hurt by so many breakdowns in families, and angry at the world for not having a mom and dad that loved me, but at the same time, I loved school and learning. I had my sights on making my adult life as successful and happy as I could make it, and I was really determined that I would achieve as much as I could in my life.”

Life After the Care System

A question she gets asked a lot is how she has managed to overcome her difficult past. “Some of the knockbacks that I got have made me stronger and even more determined,” she explains.

“I realized in my early 20s that being angry at the world and at my past was not really going to get me anywhere, so wasn’t there a way that I could turn something so negative into something a little more positive? I started focusing on learning and giving back, doing voluntary work and helping people that were less fortunate than me.”

Besides doing voluntary work, Paris also started to make a living from motivational speaking and being a trainer. “I originally started off as a school speaker through a website, so I was speaking at schools and colleges initially. And once that grew a bit more, I became self- employed, and I left my job as a secondary school teacher and a trainer. It’s great, I absolutely love it.”

Finding the Human Library

Her experience in motivational speaking and her passion for equality are what attracted her to the Human Library. She found the website through a friend who is a Book at the Library and was immediately interested: “I was really blown away by what I read, it was a perfect fit for me.”

She applied to be a book mainly to address judgements people have towards those who have been in care. “People instantly discriminate, and unfortunately, some of that discrimination is based on statistical facts: most people that grow up in that care system do end up with very poor outcomes. They end up in prison and/or with mental health problems. I wanted to be a book so I could dispel the myth that that is what all people in care are like, that we’re all damaged goods, and we are someone to stay away from. I wanted people to have the opportunity to see another side and a different outcome,” she explains.

“If there is one thing that I want people to take away from my story, it is that I am positive and happy to be me, and I wouldn’t change anything about my past.”

Dispelling Myths and Challenging Judgements 

Paris with Readers

Fortunately, her experience at the Human Library so far has allowed her to achieve this. From the questions she gets, she senses that discrimination usually comes from ignorance rather than deliberate judgment.

“The Human Library is really important for breaking down barriers, for dispelling myths, for really getting people to unjudge. The caption ‘Unjudge Someone’ is brilliant, and I like it because there is an awareness that we all judge and that judging is an important part of human life. The Human Library gives people the opportunity to really challenge their unconscious biases and question some of the thoughts and stereotypes around all sorts of issues, and meet people they wouldn’t normally meet. Humans gravitate towoards those they feel are similar to themselves, and so they don’t meet a young black female who has been in care and also just happens to not be straight. They don’t have the opportunity, so it’s nice to share that and be part of allowing people to explore our diversity.”

The Human Library gives Paris an opportunity to talk about the care system, but especially her specific story and about “race, colour, sexuality, gender and all of those identity issues that people need to hear about from the people that are experiencing them.”

The Human Library Family

The Human Library also helps her further create more positivity and healing. “I find it’s quite therapeutic to talk about my past because it’s a difficult past. Talking about it isn’t painful because, as a motivational speaker, I talk about it a lot – but it’s therapeutic, it’s still healing.”

As she has done both online and face-to-face readings, she has also found the benefits in both. The virtual readings have given her an opportunity to meet readers from all over the world, while the face-to-face readings have given her a sense of community with the other books. “The books are all so lovely and so diverse. I find it quite exciting to be in a room with someone who describes themselves as a Satanist. I’ve met people in the Human Library that I know I wouldn’t have met in real life. Everyone is just so supportive and caring, we really do look out for one another. The Human Library family is definitely like a family, and to someone like me who has grown up as I did, that’s really important.”

Want to know more about our Books? Read about our last Books of the month, Andy and Bernadette.

The post Book of the Month: Care Experienced Child appeared first on The Human Library Organization.