My name is Will. I’m a dad. I was a schoolteacher for twenty years. I founded the Bionic Project. And I’m also an amputee.  

I was in a car accident at the age of 21, and for a long time after I lost my leg, I tried very hard to hide my prosthetic. I wore long pants even in ninety-degree weather because I just wanted to blend in. Whenever I walked into a room, I had a habit. I would immediately start scanning.

Who has noticed?
Who is staring?
Who is trying not to stare?

Difference has a way of making you feel like the whole room is watching. My biggest challenge wasn’t learning to walk again. It was acceptance.

Accepting my new body.
Accepting the prosthetic.
Accepting that people were going to stare.

For a while, I thought the best way to deal with that was to hide the difference. And then something unexpected happened when I had kids. My daughters, Bella and Sophie, didn’t see any of that. To them, I wasn’t an amputee. I was just Dad. They didn’t see something broken or different. They just saw me.

That unconditional acceptance changed something. I realized that if I could feel comfortable in my own body, most other people would be too. Yes, there would still be questions. Yes, there would still be stares. But if I leaned into my difference instead of hiding it, people would usually meet me there.

My daughters helped change my perspective, but it also made me wonder. If unconditional love from two little girls could change the way I saw disability, how do we change the way society sees it? How do we make a bigger shift?

How do we stop treating disability as something rare or “other” and start seeing it as part of the human condition?  

That question eventually led me to start the Bionic Project, an education organization that brings teachers and athletes with physical disabilities into K-12 schools. Our team visits classrooms across the country where students try adaptive sports, tackle inclusive design challenges, and critically examine how disability is portrayed in the media.  

When students begin to question those narratives, they often discover two surprising truths: we are far more alike than we are different, and many of the everyday tools we rely on today were created to solve problems faced by people with disabilities. 

I often explain that second idea by telling a story about my daughters, Bella and Sophie. They are grown up now —well, kind of. They’re Gen Z, which apparently means two things: they travel to EDM music festivals all the time, and they pack like they’re moving there permanently.

So, imagine a typical trip.

They wake up in the morning and brush their teeth with an electric toothbrush, originally designed for people with limited dexterity.

Then they pack for the trip, which basically means dumping their entire closet into a massive suitcase with wheels. They roll that suitcase down the sidewalk and across the street using curb cuts, originally built so wheelchair users could move through cities.

They stop for an iced coffee and grab a bendy straw, originally invented so hospital patients could drink while lying down.

They arrive at the airport and walk through automatic doors. Those doors weren’t originally designed for people with disabilities, but they became widespread because buildings needed to be accessible to wheelchair users. Today, they make life easier for everyone, carrying luggage, pushing strollers, or simply walking through with their hands full.

They sit in the airport lounge watching TV with closed captions, originally created for people with hearing loss.

They pull out their phones and start texting using touchscreens and predictive text, technologies that grew out of assistive communication tools.

Then they get on the plane and settle in with an audiobook, a format that began as “talking books” created so blind readers could access written stories.

They listen through Meta glasses with bone-conduction speakers, a technology first explored by Beethoven as he began losing his hearing.

And without realizing it, Bella and Sophie, two non-disabled young women, have spent the entire morning relying on technologies that were originally designed for people with disabilities. Solutions designed for a few that ended up transforming life for everyone.

Seen this way, disability has been one of humanity’s greatest engines of innovation. This perspective matters because the next generation of entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers is sitting in classrooms right now.

They will design our cities.
They’ll design our technology.
They’ll design the systems that shape our lives.

If the next generation learns to see disability not as a limitation but as a source of creativity and possibility, they will design a very different world, one that works better for everyone.

Disability is often treated as something that belongs to a small group of people. But the truth is, it is the one category of identity that all of us will experience at some point in our lives — through injury, illness, or simply the process of aging.

When we recognize that reality, the way we design our communities and the way we see one another begins to shift. There is a little less hiding, a little less shame, and a little more connection and community. Which, in the end, is something all of us need in order to thrive.