At the recently renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport, it’s a crapshoot whether a staff member will be readily available to walk with me as a sighted guide, or whether they will insist on a wheelchair and I will insist on a scene. Being offered a wheelchair is the bane of blind travelers’ existence. Some of us handle it less quietly than others.
I always think about DBT in airports, both the original and the new neurodiversity-affirming version. Marsha Linehan, the creator of DBT, accidentally taught me about dissociation, the one where you split yourself into pieces, not the floaty kind. My social work supervisor asked me to read her 2015 manual, and I couldn’t understand why part of me tried to stay eager and absorbent, while another part felt leaden every time I started reading, always teetering on sleep. I guess dissonance is tiring. DBT is made of a soft enough fabric, but you can trace the threads of applied behavioral analysis in its lineage if you know where the seams are, or if you are me and your fingers crash into them without meaning to. There’s an entire subsection, for example, that carefully diagrams the appropriate uses of punishment.
Neurodiversity-affirming DBT is thicker, more padded. It is the poofy white leather loveseat my mom bought me from an old lady in San Francisco, which lent itself to perching. It was both too small to contain my edges and something I should like.
1. Observe: Emphasize noticing whether you’re being willful but not judging it. Notice, “I’m being willful in this moment. Hmm, I’m not letting this go. Hmm, I’m really sticking to my guns here.” Be curious and nonjudgmental. Ask Wise Mind whether it’s effective to be willful at this moment (Brook & Kraus, 2026, p. 148).
The woman at the Jet Blue counter has short blond hair and is wearing a cross. I will learn these details from my mom later so I can identify her to the complaint resolution officer. “No, we unfortunately can’t do that,” she says when I explain that I don’t need a wheelchair, just someone to guide me to the gate. “I wish we could, but we can’t leave the counter. We have a company that provides wheelchair assistance, but they don’t have time to walk with you. The wheelchair is your best bet.” She turns to my mom. “Unless you want to get a pass and walk her through security yourself?”
Somehow, I am back to being a child on vacation. We’re driving to the beach. I wasn’t hungry at breakfast because the bagels were too thick. Sensory sensitivities are legitimate, but I am also ten and petulant in a way that defies categorization. The banging of my hunger is indistinguishable from the banging of my family’s annoyance. The rest of us wait in the car while my father goes into a deli. The only thing I can remotely eat is a tuna sandwich that has onions in it. My dad is well-acquainted with my hatred of onions, but maybe because they are finely chopped, I will tolerate them. He returns to the car with some tuna on a metal spoon for me to try. His outstretched hand is flimsy and uncertain. Just yesterday when I was struggling to clamber up a rock, he pulled me up with his strong dentist’s fingers. “Monkey grip!” he had shouted.
The tuna is doable and the day is not completely ruined, but I have made a doll of my father.
At the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, a supervisor is called but she doesn’t come. My stepdad is in the car circling, and my mom has an appointment that she can’t miss. She cares that sitting in the wheelchair would be hard for me, but her impatience is banging, and she worries we have no other option. She is impatient with the airport lady, not with me. The banging is diffuse and doesn’t know the difference.
Could I just sit in the wheelchair? Let’s be curious about that. Why would it be such a big deal? Here are the facts. The airport employee is being ableist by forcing me to use an accommodation for a disability I don’t have. Besides, it feels scary not to be in control of when I stop and start moving. I would like to go to the bathroom and Starbucks before I’m deposited at the gate, and if I’m in a wheelchair, it could be less likely that the airport employee will consider my requests. On the other hand, this trip to the gate won’t be forever. The supervisor might agree with the woman at the counter and then where would I be? If I make the choice not to fight this thing, because I don’t want to waste my mom’s time and I don’t want to miss my flight and fighting wouldn’t be effective here, maybe I could insulate myself from shame. My tuna spoon part laughs at me. The shame has already hardened.
2. Radically accept being willful and the consequences of it (Brook & Kraus, 2026, p. 149).
On the playground in third grade, Bethany says we are going to run around and kiss boys. I tell her I am not interested in this game and furthermore that it is against the rules. I’m more sanctimonious than I am scared. I wrote a song about “the core values” and “the four respects,” which my music teacher loves but the other students scorn. Rebelling against my peers feels safer than pissing off the adults, who make much more sense anyway.
Bethany tells me that if I don’t play the kissing game, my other choice is to be left stranded somewhere in open space. She will play four square for the rest of the week, and I’ll be stuck with whichever unwilling classmate our teacher assigns to me. Our friendship is foundering even now; it won’t survive the start of middle school, but Bethany is part of my body. I turn my hatred towards the fragment of me who thought disobeying her could ever be grammatical.
3. Turning the Mind: Consider whether it would be more effective to add some willingness. It does not have to be all-or-nothing. For example, you might stick to your guns advocating for something but realize, upon consulting your Wise Mind, that it would be more effective to adjust tactics a bit. You are trying to figure out that balance of being flexible and advocating effectively (Brook & Kraus, 2026, p. 149).
“Could they just bring the wheelchair, and I’ll just walk and won’t sit in it?” I ask the woman at the counter. I’ve seen other blind people do this, and it could make the whole problem go away.
“That’s not practical,” my mom says. “It’s too hard for them to navigate you through all of those narrow spaces, pushing the chair, rolling the bag, and guiding you.” She has a point and there is no sign of the supervisor. “Maybe you just have to sit in the chair, Tash,” my mom concedes. “They’re not trained to walk with you, and it could be the safest thing.”
Could I do it? Maybe I could put my justice sensitivity aside for one minute and use the chair until my mom leaves and then unfreeze myself enough to yell at the pusher to stop or jump out of the chair if I had to. I knew I wouldn’t be able to accomplish either of these things once I was seated, but it was a nice heroic story, a bribe ten-year-old me would be more likely to accept.
4. Present half-smiling and willing posture as options that might help clients feel more willing and flexible if they want to. Explain that what they do with their bodies can provide feedback to their minds that can affect how willing they feel (Brook & Kraus, 2026, p. 149).
I’m in the ocean with a close friend. It’s early September and the air is less forgiving than the water. My lips are blue and my friend notices and asks if I want to get out. We’re together just for this one waning afternoon. I watch myself, starfish-like, grow an appendage that is immune to the cold. I siphon most of my awareness there so we can stay in the waves a little longer.
5. Curiously explore “What is the threat?” If your Wise Mind tells you, it would be effective to be more flexible, then you can curiously explore what is the threat that is getting in the way of being flexible? Sometimes you’ll realize, “There really is a threat. There’s a good reason why I’m being willful here.” And sometimes, if you give yourself time, if you use some of your Crisis Survival skills, if you get more into Wise Mind, you might realize that you’re being willful for a reason that isn’t super-important and maybe it would be more effective to choose to be more willing. If you choose to be willing, guess what? You’re still in control of your own responses, right? You’re not giving up control (Brook & Kraus, 2026, p. 149).
I take some slow breaths. Slow is more important than deep.
“I’ll do it,” I tell my mom. “It will be okay. I’ll sit in the wheelchair.” I don’t quite know who this me is. She isn’t smiling, but she sounds genuine and pragmatic, and she is not a child. Her confidence is bigger than my mom’s fear.
A man comes with the wheelchair. The woman at the counter has her back to us. My mom quickly asks the man if I can walk instead, and he casually hands the wheelchair off to a colleague. People can surprise us by being reasonable, even when systems remain broken. By the time the airport counter lady starts looking for me, I am already gone.
My feet are walking, but my mind is trapped inside a bead of willingness, bracing for the other ending of this story. After all, it could happen again. The other ending goes something like this:
A man comes with the wheelchair. He refuses to hand it off. I will sit down and try to access the dialectic. Everyone is a bit grainy at the airport; this is just an extreme and annoying case, but it isn’t punishment and it isn’t personal. I don’t have to like it but because I can’t advocate more right now, I should accept it, name the reality of it.
I have lost autonomy temporarily, but I have made a deliberate choice to prevent my mother’s day and mine from getting derailed. In a few hours I will come home to my apartment, and I will feed my cat and wash dishes and call my autistic best friend. My image will stop buffering, eventually resolve into high definition.
Only a pencil shaving of me will be erased.
