Amy Purdy and Why Disability Doesn't Follow a Script
When someone acquires a disability, people often assume they know what comes next. Grief. Anger. Acceptance. Adjustment. As though disability follows a predictable path—one that eventually ends with someone "coming to terms with it. "But life rarely works that way.
Amy Purdy's story reminds us why. At nineteen years old, Amy contracted bacterial meningitis. Within days, she had lost both legs below the knee, experienced kidney failure, and was facing a future she had never imagined.¹ No one could have predicted what the years ahead would hold. Not Amy. Not her family. Not her doctors.
Today, she is known around the world as a Paralympic snowboarder, entrepreneur, bestselling author, TEDx speaker, runner-up on Dancing with the Stars, and co-founder of Adaptive Action Sports—an organization dedicated to creating opportunities for people with physical disabilities to participate in action sports.²
Those accomplishments are remarkable. But I don't think they're the most important part of her story. I think it's the question she asked herself when her life suddenly changed: "If my life were a book, and I were the author, how would I want the story to go?"³
Is "Adjustment" the Right Question?
When someone acquires a disability, one of the first questions people often ask is whether they've adjusted. It sounds compassionate. But psychologist Dr. Rhoda Olkin invited therapists to ask a different question.⁴ Instead of asking whether someone has "adjusted," she encouraged therapists to become curious about how someone is responding.
It sounds like a small difference. It isn't. One assumes there's somewhere you're supposed to arrive. The other leaves room for life to keep changing.
Becoming the Author
One moment from Amy's TEDx Talk has stayed with me. Lying in bed after losing both legs, she asked herself: "If my life were a book, and I were the author, how would I want the story to go?"³ She didn't know what the next chapter would hold. She simply realized she was still allowed to begin writing it.
Understanding Response in Context
One of the things I appreciate most about Dr. Rhoda Olkin's work is that she challenged the idea that people's responses to disability can be understood through a single, predictable trajectory.⁴
Instead, she encouraged therapists to understand responses in the context of the lives people are living.⁴ For Amy, responding didn't simply mean learning to walk on prosthetic legs. It meant asking whether she could snowboard again.
When she couldn't find prosthetic feet that would let her snowboard, she spent a year looking for a solution.When she still couldn't find one, she and her prosthetist built their own.³ Not from some revolutionary new technology. From bolts. Rubber. Wood. And bright pink duct tape.³ They weren't perfect.But they were enough to get her back on the mountain.
Years later, responding took on a different shape. She co-founded Adaptive Action Sports so more young people with physical disabilities could experience action sports and discover what was possible for themselves.² Those weren't steps toward becoming "adjusted." They were responses to the life she was living. Someone else's responses may look entirely different. And that's exactly the point.
Disability-affirmative therapy doesn't ask whether someone's response is "normal," "healthy," or "well-adjusted." It asks: what helps us understand this response? Because responses make the most sense when we understand the life they're responding to.
What This Looks Like in Disability-Affirmative Therapy
Disability-affirmative therapy doesn't begin by asking whether someone has adjusted. It begins with curiosity. What has this experience been like for you? What matters most to you? How are you responding to the life you're living today? Because two people can experience similar disabilities...and build entirely different lives.Neither life is more "adjusted" than the other. They're responses to different circumstances, values, opportunities, and goals.
The Legacy of Disability Advocacy
When people tell Amy Purdy's story, it's easy to begin with the ending. The Paralympics. Dancing with the Stars. Her TEDx Talk. Adaptive Action Sports. But that's not how life is lived. Life is lived before we know how the chapter ends.That's what I think Amy's story offers disabled people.Not a blueprint.Not a promise that life will unfold the way hers did. And certainly not an expectation that everyone should respond as she did.
Instead, she offers something quieter. Permission to imagine a future that belongs to you. Permission to respond to your own life. Perhaps that's why Dr. Rhoda Olkin's distinction between adjustment and response feels so powerful.⁴ It reminds us that there isn't one way people are supposed to respond to disability. Amy Purdy reminds us that even when life changes our story, it isn't over.
We can keep responding to the life we're living.
If you're looking for disability-affirmative therapy in BC, I provide virtual counselling for teens and adults with physical disabilities, chronic illness, medical trauma, and advocacy fatigue. Learn more about Disability-Affirmative Therapy
Notes
Amy Purdy, On My Own Two Feet (New York: HarperOne, 2014).
Adaptive Action Sports, "About," accessed August 1, 2026, https://www.adacs.org/.
Amy Purdy, "Living Beyond Limits," TEDxOrangeCoast, filmed May 2011, video, TEDx Talks, June 8, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2QZM7azGoA.
Rhoda Olkin, Disability-Affirmative Therapy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 44–45; see also Rhoda Olkin, What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).
Bibliography
Adaptive Action Sports. "About." Accessed August 1, 2026. https://www.adacs.org/.
Olkin, Rhoda. Disability-Affirmative Therapy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Olkin, Rhoda. What Psychotherapists Should Know About Disability. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Purdy, Amy. On My Own Two Feet. New York: HarperOne, 2014.
Purdy, Amy. "Living Beyond Limits." TEDxOrangeCoast. Filmed May 2011. Video. TEDx Talks. Published June 8, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2QZM7azGoA.
