Lo que hasta ahora soy. Mi presentación personal en Hive | What I am so far. My personal presentation in Hive

It is said that every man is what he makes of what they made of him. Very true. Since disability I have longed for and achieved things, some things I have not achieved, but trying is perhaps the best part of the whole process.

I was born and have lived for 41 years in a typical popular community in the interior of Venezuela, to be more exact in the municipality of San Felipe in the state of Yaracuy. I was raised with the love and care of two women, my grandmother and my mother, as is also typical in this country and in our society.

When I was three years old I contracted poliomyelitis, from there I got the sequels in my body that make me need a wheelchair to move around and perform all my activities. For some it may be a lot of words to say that I got polio and that is why I "have" a disability. From my point of view they are the necessary words, because disability does not exist in me. I have a physical condition like everyone reading this and it is in the interaction with the environment and society that disability arises, an environment and a society tailored for a few and not for all.

For that reason, as a child I noticed little or no difference between my sister, my friends and me while we played hide and seek, metras (marbles) or ball. Childhood is a reality of its own rules where adults have not yet taught us enough things to take us away from our essence as human beings.

But one must be educated, formally and institutionally, with a diploma on the wall, to "be someone in life". This is how my mother instilled in me a love for education, a love that continues in me but with certain changes. Today I still have the same curiosity and eagerness to learn new things every day, but from a self-taught approach, far from conventions and classrooms.

However, I was educated in a formal way, starting in the "little school" of the community. School where already those friends of childhood games began to taste of the tree of knowledge and thus began to notice differences between them and me. After school it was high school. And like many, it was in high school where I met love for the first time, but not the romantic one, heh heh heh heh, the real love of friends, that at that moment you don't suspect it, but they will be the friends that will accompany you for the rest of your life. Today, years later, I am pleasantly surprised when I remember how that group of 11 and 12 year old kids were able to joke with me during a recess, to be with me at all times, to escape from class to go to the video games and with the same willingness to accompany me home every day walking a couple of kilometers. All of this seems very normal, but don't forget the detail that I was the boy who moved around in a wheelchair. A detail perhaps very obvious to everyone except us at the time.

High school ends and the first heartbreak is also experienced. Separating the day to day from those friends.

University education begins. I studied computer science, not for vocation but for lack of other alternatives. In that distant 1996 computers were an exclusive area for privileged minds and unfortunately I was always made to believe that I stood out for my intelligence. It only took one subject, Programming I, to make me realize that I had been lied to all my life. Eventually I discovered that the important thing was not to be smart, the important thing was to look smart.

When I was 19 years old, I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and I was faced for the first time with what to do with my life outside the classroom. The longed-for job stability has never been easy for me, much less economic stability.

Living in a region with few job opportunities, within a country with similar characteristics and everything added to my particular physical condition, employment alternatives are reduced considerably, and not to be pessimistic, it is a reality in much of Latin America, if not all.

Looking for my place I have done different things. I have worked from home in the area of computer repair and maintenance, design, writing, transcription. I like to believe that I have never stood still and have always sought to create my possibilities.

I discovered voice-over and communication and started a new career. Studying both meant leaving the state of Yaracuy, to the neighboring state of Lara. Which was only possible thanks to the support in every way, from the economic, through the emotional and physical, of my mother. A woman who did not give birth to me once, but who gives birth to me every day, because simply nothing in me would be possible without her.

In 2006 I obtained my certificate in voice-over, a necessary requirement in Venezuela to formally practice voice-over, although what is in surplus in the country is the person who gives opinions and speaks through the media. And in 2011 I graduated with a degree in Social Communication. Each new goal accomplished only brought more pressure as I asked myself "and now what do I do". Sorry to be a spoiler, to this day I'm still asking myself the same question.

But I encourage myself by telling myself that I found my vocation in voice-over, I don't know how good I'll be at it, but I'm passionate about it. Every now and then I give myself the opportunity to learn more about it through workshops on dubbing, acting, narration in different formats, among other things.

In all that walking I got a job, but it is not to rejoice too much. In 2014 I started as an employee of the public administration, administrative staff in a school. Those who are from Venezuela know that in recent years we are the workers with the lowest wages in a country with the lowest wages in the region.

In the past two years my greatest job satisfaction has been the ability to record a few audiobooks and recently lending my voice to two audiovisual works for Sins Invalid, a justice-based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, with an emphasis on artists of color and LGBTQ artists.

This same search for alternatives and creating possibilities is what brings me to Hive. Sometimes you open so many doors that later you don't remember what you were looking for in that place. I don't know how I got to the Telegram group where the kind @laloretoyya shared her knowledge on the subject and although I had heard about it, I hadn't paid enough attention to it.

I'm here because I want to contribute from my experience about the things I know. Whether it's about voice-over, computers and communication, and also tell you about what it's like to live with a disability, which in my life is everything that unites what I've done and what I haven't done.

I want to think that there are young people with disabilities in these communities, that there are family members and friends of people with disabilities on this platform, and that my experience can serve them, not as an example (may the universe forbid me to pretend to be an example of anything) but as help, support, perhaps company, perhaps so that we don't feel alone.

My name is Richard Cardona Coa and this is what I have done so far with what they made of me.

You can learn a little more about me through my Facebook and Instagram accounts.