Still Becoming
Identity Is Not Fixed at the Moment of Loss
At nine years old, Tiffany Yu lost her father and acquired a permanent disability in the same car accident. She has spent the decades since building one of the world's most prominent disability advocacy communities — and figuring out, layer by layer, who she actually is beyond everything that happened to her.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Tiffany Yu — founder and CEO of Diversability, author of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, speaker, community builder, competitive paraclimber, and one of the most prominent disability advocates working today.
When we talk about life-changing moments, we usually mean moments that interrupted a life already in progress. But what happens when that moment arrives at nine years old, when you are still becoming for the first time? Tiffany's story begins there — in a car accident that took her father's life and left her with a permanent disability — and it has been unfolding ever since. What she has built from the intersection of identity, loss, and belonging is something most people only dream of creating.
This conversation is about all three kinds of grief she named before most people knew to name any of them. It is about what community can do that no individual can do alone. And it is about the quiet, ongoing work of becoming — which, as Tiffany is clear about, doesn't stop at any particular age.
Three Kinds of Grief at Once
Tiffany was nine years old, the youngest of four children in a family that had lived in Maryland suburbia, Barbados, and Taiwan. Her father was an immigrant from Taiwan. Her mother a refugee from Vietnam. She was taking ballet classes, learning piano and violin, still mostly defined by being the youngest in a family of six.
Then the accident. And with it, not one loss but three — a distinction Tiffany makes with unusual clarity.
There is the grief of losing her father, which most people understand. There is what she calls disability grief — or what researcher Jane Mattingly calls body grief, the grief anyone experiences when their body changes, at any stage of life. And there is a third: the loss of childhood innocence. The nine-year-old who had a childlike sense of awe and wonder and curiosity about the world, and had it all transformed in a sudden moment.
"At nine years old, you're old enough to know what's going on, but you're too young to know what's going on as well."
— Tiffany YuFor more than twenty years, she wore long sleeves year-round to hide her arm. She didn't talk about the accident. She didn't talk about her father. She was anchoring herself, she says now, to a non-disabled identity — to someone who hadn't experienced grief. It wasn't until she was in college, and then well beyond it, that she was finally diagnosed with PTSD. The language had simply never been given to her. No one had equipped her with it.
Finding Identity Through Community — Twice
The unraveling began at Georgetown University, and it began not with disability but with heritage. Tiffany had not identified strongly as Taiwanese or Vietnamese growing up in a predominantly white Maryland suburb — there were no mirrors. At Georgetown, she met a student whose mother was also from Taiwan. They started a club. It is still thriving today.
Through the Taiwanese American Student Club, she found community, pride, and a deepening sense of what it meant to belong to something. She found herself wishing her father could have seen her be proud of where he came from. She started to understand, through that experience, what it felt like to move something from shame into culture.
"Once something is embedded within culture — disability culture, Taiwanese culture — there's community, history, art, music, narrative change, systems change embedded within there as well."
— Tiffany YuA couple of years later, she took what she had learned about starting a club and applied it to disability. The first iteration of Diversability at Georgetown launched in 2009. Finding the first members was hard — she started with the friends she had made through the Taiwanese American club, who showed up not because disability was their cause but because she was their person. Cross-movement solidarity, she calls it now. She just needed bodies in the room.
In 2024, Diversability celebrated fifteen years since that first iteration. Georgetown now has a disability studies minor, a disability studies major, and a physical disability cultural center. Tiffany didn't build all of that — but she planted seeds that others grew. The Taiwanese American club she co-founded is still around. So is the spirit of what she started.
Building What Didn't Exist
October 22nd, 2009. The first time Tiffany shared the story of the car accident publicly, at a half-day conference at Georgetown. She cried. And she discovered something: that sharing the story didn't make her more alone. People saw themselves in it.
From that moment, the work of building Diversability required two things she names with precision. First: owning the story, in whatever length and form the situation calls for. She now has a ten-minute version, a one-sentence version, and everything in between. Second: the willingness to act before feeling ready. The $500 grant that someone else believed in when she wasn't sure anyone would. The question she kept asking herself — if not me, then who?
"In 2009, it did feel like it was going to be all on me. One of my unlearnings has been: it can't just all be me."
— Tiffany YuDiversability now reaches 80,000 people and growing across its digital ecosystem. The Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter, which Tiffany co-founded in 2017 with the late Alice Wong, has distributed over 111 grants of $1,000 each across nineteen countries. Some of those early $1,000 projects now have annual budgets in the millions.
The model she has built is rooted in a belief she articulates clearly: democratize visibility. Lean into abundance. All stories matter. The goal is not a single narrative or a single leader — it is a fabric woven from every disabled person's experience, in every industry, showing that disabled people exist everywhere and always have.
Who She Is When None of the Titles Are in the Room
Amanda asks the question directly: who are you when the advocate, the CEO, the author, all of it — steps away? Tiffany's answer is unhurried and unusually honest.
She is someone who wants to be the embodiment of play, fun, and joy. Someone who prioritizes rest in a space that doesn't talk enough about it. Someone who has spent recent years deliberately exploring the things nine-year-old Tiffany loved — and discovering what they mean now, as an adult who has been the youngest in a family of six and the founder of a global movement and everything in between.
She went to a gathering for neurodivergent people recently where no one knew who she was. She sat in the arts and crafts room, asked questions when she felt like it, retreated when she didn't. She started surfing. She is not good at it and has no aspirations — she just lives by the ocean and hadn't taken advantage of it.
"I do feel like I'm still 100% my authentic self — just not all at the same time. I'm discovering which parts of myself get to show up where."
— Tiffany YuHer legacy, she thinks, lives in the book. Not because she wants to be remembered as the author, but because people keep telling her that something in The Anti-Ableist Manifesto sparked an action they took, an initiative they started, a conversation they were finally able to name. That is what she built it for. Anyone should be able to pick it up and become an advocate. It is not supposed to be all on her anymore.
Climbing as Reclamation
Ninety percent of disabled girls and women don't participate in any sport or physical activity. Tiffany was part of that statistic for twenty years. She has an entire TED talk about how traumatizing gym class was growing up — how no one tried to make sports for her, how she learned to walk into any physical space and immediately assess whether it was for her, and almost always decide it wasn't.
The journey back to sport began with a pageant, of all things — Miss Amazing, a pageant for women with disabilities. It continued with a memory: a birthday party at a rock climbing gym, age eight or nine, where she climbed to the top and then decided to traverse horizontally across the ceiling instead of coming down. Possibly against the rules. Definitely in character.
After her book came out and the launch exhaustion set in, she told a man named Wayne — who was running a portable climbing wall at her book signing — that she wanted to start rock climbing. He sent her every adaptive climbing clinic happening in Los Angeles. He called ahead when she hesitated. He did not let her off the hook.
She showed up to her first session in December 2023. The instructor, Jake — a former competitive climber for Team USA — told her afterward that she could be competitive. She didn't tell anyone when she signed up for the national championships. She got last. She was placed on the national development team. She competed in three of four events that season.
"I'm almost thirty years out from having my disability. And thirty years later, I'm still finding new and novel ways to explore it."
— Tiffany YuShe is the only single-armed female competitive climber in the world. Paraclimbing is being introduced at the Paralympic level at LA 2028. She will not say she is definitely going, but she will say she is technically an LA 2028 Paralympic hopeful. She is also navigating the tension between climbing as something purely for herself — rehabilitation, joy, the quiet discovery of a body still capable of surprising her — and the pull toward using her platform to elevate the visibility of paraclimbing for the 90% of disabled women who still don't know sport is an option for them.
She is trying not to lose the for me part of it. She is not sure she always succeeds.
Why This Conversation Matters
There is a version of life that gets handed to us. And there is a version we build — often from the wreckage of the first one. Tiffany Yu has been building hers since she was nine years old, without a map, without the language for what happened to her, and often without mirrors showing her that what she was becoming was possible.
What she has learned, and what she offers here, is that identity is not fixed at the moment of loss or change. It keeps expanding. It keeps surprising you. The beef noodle soup that seemed strange because no one else around you was eating it turns out to be part of something you are deeply proud of. The disability you hid under long sleeves for twenty years turns out to be the foundation of a global community. The sport that was never made for you turns out to be the thing that is making you stronger, thirty years later, in ways you never anticipated.
To be seen is not the same as to belong. To survive is not the same as to thrive. To carry a label is not the same as being contained by it.
You are not behind. You are becoming.
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