The Power of My Disability

Joy was declared 80% spastic and was doomed to be dependent on help twenty-four hours a day her entire life. In the meantime, she runs her own company sitting in a wheelchair, gives seminars and coaches people who want to learn to think differently. She is married, has a wonderful daughter and has written her first book The Power of my Disability.Her first years of life she spent in hospitals and finally she ended upin the famous or rather ill famed “Het Dorp” in Arnhem (an institution for disabled people) where she only had one goal: to get out of the institution.Something that Joy describes in her book is how people in these institutions are often told what they are not able to do and are definitely not taught what they might possibly be able to do.The help disabled people receive makes her helpless.Focusing on the impossibilities instead of focusing on the possibilities.Joy van der Stel wanted to be different and get away from this oppressing situation, which she did in the end: she lived on her own when she was twenty-three.Meanwhile, Joy has been on several television programs. She was asked by Dutch shows such as “De Wandeling” by KRO (Dutch channel), gave an interview in the talk show “Het Elfde Uur”, was a guest on the Dutch television channel MAX and several other local television channels.She does not shun the media because she wants to tell her story.Joy wants to point out the possibilities to disabled as well as non-disabled people because most people only think of their impossibilities.