“There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there’s no attempt to cure them. You can argue that it’s harder in the United States — our current presidency notwithstanding — to be a person of color. And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair.

There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group. And I call them horizontal identities, because the peer group is the horizontal experience. These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure.”

– Andrew Solomon, Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what

It’s 12 : 20  PM on day 1499 of my journey towards independence and I’ve managed to brush my teeth, pray, read Ecclesiastes 6, publish my Disability of the Day feature, promote my Educate Generations campaign – Barbara Royce made a donation of $40 yesterday evening (thank you SO MUCH Barbra the fact that you would give your hard earned money to help people you don’t even know says a lot about you as a person 🙂 )  which brings my total raised to $460 only $2040 more to raise  – stretch my hamstrings,  feed myself egg with bread and a banana for breakfast  and continue promoting my campaign – still on $460 but that’s okay more donations will come I’m sure of it.

This morning I watched Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what (thank you, Juliet Merrell, for sharing it with me) which is an eloquent and intelligent Ted Talk about identity and parents’ unconditional love for their children, Watch Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what below: