Coming off of my Huffington Post début while writing for YAI (and hopefully another one forthcoming), I entered the office this morning with a thought: "This feels good!" It is very gratifying to be recognized for your talents, at any level. Then another thought occurred to me: "Keep my ego in balance." Yes, I did get recognized and it is a tremendous honor. I am still me, though, a young professional trying to make his way. I am reminded that the ideas and concepts that I put forth are often more important than any one person.

I was born Irish, Scottish and Italian — and this is independent of my disabilities. I come to the office and I work seven hours a day. I'm just like everyone else and it feels good to say that. Having not very visible disabilities is both a gift and a curse. A gift because I get to challenge, and hopefully change, perceptions of what others think people with disabilities can and cannot do. A curse because since I don't fit a common notion of what having with a disability is, people don’t know what to make of me sometimes. Because of this, they jump to all sort of wrong conclusions. More often than not, they don't give me a chance.

This is a common plight for people with disabilities and we experience it in the workplace, in relationships, in education, in health care or even within our own families. If a person with a disability makes something of himself/herself, he or she is often elevated to the status of being a "Super Crip," someone who has made it against all odds. This is again, a gift and a curse. Often a short-lived gift, because once your "fifteen minutes of fame" is up, people tend to forget you and what you did in the first place. Our culture has a bad case of A.D.D. The curse of being a "Super Crip" is that if you can't maintain a high level of function for whatever reason, people lose interest in you — fast.

It is even more of a curse for other people with disabilities because it puts yet another expectation on them to be on par with the "Super Crip." Our culture either doesn't expect anything from people with disabilities — or they have way too high expectations of us. Either way, people with disabilities aren't given many chances, while some aren't given any chances at all.

My talents are influenced by my passion and vice versa. They both come from my disabilities. I view my cerebral palsy and my creative spark as inseparable from one another. A life coach I worked with several years ago, told me that there was nothing more important than a life of love and service to others. Every day in this office, I feel those words and the massive impact they carry.

While reading another Huffington Post blogger, Trisha Lynn Sprayberry, in her post, "The Gift My Disability Gave Me," she writes that through her disability: "I was gifted the vision to see beyond the flaws of the human condition, to advocate for an equal life experience for those with disabilities." I agree with that statement and I truly believe that passion colors everything through love and service.