The tribe, in its own words.
First-person stories from the people who live with voice impairment — stroke survivors, AAC users, autistic individuals, ALS patients, people with aphasia and apraxia and dysarthria and brain injury, and the families around them. Not stories about them. Stories from them.
How this works. AgeWell Alliance does not write fictional stories or use AI to produce stories about people we serve. Every story published here is from a real person, in their own words (or their AAC system's words, or words a family member sets down for them with their consent), with their explicit permission to publish.
We don't speak for the community. We open the door so the community speaks for itself.
This page is open and waiting.
You're seeing this page in its honest first state — empty. We could fill it with composite stories or AI-written narratives and call it content. We won't. The first story posted here will be a real one, from a real person, with their consent. If that's you, the door is below.
Six rules we won't break for a good story.
If we have to violate any of these to get a piece on the page, we don't run the piece. The work has to model what we ask the world to do.
Your words, your story.
We light-edit for clarity, never for tone or politics. If you write in fragments, we publish fragments. If your AAC voice is yours, we don't smooth it into ours.
You name yourself.
You choose how you're identified — first name, full name, anonymous, pseudonym, the community language you prefer ("autistic," "person with aphasia," "AAC user"). We follow you.
Consent that can be withdrawn.
If you ask us to take your story down, it comes down — that day. No appeal, no negotiation, no "but we paid for it." We don't pay for stories so this stays clean.
No pity, no inspiration porn.
We don't publish stories framed as tragedy-porn or "look at this brave person" filler. The community has rejected that frame and so do we. Your story is allowed to be ordinary, hard, funny, angry, or quiet.
Family proxies need explicit user consent.
Family or caregivers can help submit, transcribe, or co-write — but only with the voice-impaired person's clear yes. For people who cannot consent (advanced dementia, comatose recovery), we publish the family's own story, framed as theirs, never as a proxy of the patient's.
No AI, ever.
We will not use generative AI to write, embellish, or compose stories on this page. AI tools may be used by storytellers themselves in their writing process, however they like. We just don't run the model from this end.
Some prompts if you want a starting place.
You don't have to answer any of these. But sometimes a prompt loosens the first sentence.
Possible starting points
- The day you realized your voice wasn't going to come back the way it was — or the day you decided that was OK.
- The first time someone in public actually waited for you to finish a sentence.
- A moment a doctor, teacher, or stranger refused to communicate with you, and what you wished they'd done instead.
- What it took to get the AAC device, the school accommodation, the workplace tool — and who finally said yes.
- What you want a town clerk, ER intake nurse, or restaurant manager to know about you before you walk in.
- A story about your kid, your parent, your partner — that they've consented to you telling — that the world should hear.
- Something funny. The world doesn't expect that, which is exactly why it's worth telling.