It was about 2pm in the afternoon, and I was feeling real hungry. There was a pizza shop downtown and they have really good slices of pizza, so I went in to get a slice. The store was not really busy that day. I saw a person come in before me and the woman behind the counter was talking to that customer. They said, "have a good day," to the customer and the customer went about they business.

Then – and here comes the other part – I went up to order a slice of pizza and the woman behind the counter start to roll their eyes at me. She have a look like, "how can I help you?" Like, you – why are you in this store? Like she was looking down on me, like she didn't see me as normal. I did try to ask her "why you looking at me like that?" but she kept saying "how can I help you?" She and the other employees were actually laughing behind my back as I left the store.

This was the second time this happened to me. No one but me knows about the first time.

Me and my friend was about to go to the mall and we stopped at a Wawa. We had just ordered two Wawa shorty hoagies, ‘cause they was on sale, and I was gonna go get a diet Dr Pepper and some chips to go with my hoagie. A store employee came up to me and she said, "are you looking for your caretaker?" I said, "Excuse me, miss, I don't have no caretaker. I'm a college student."

Steam was blowing out of my head.

She said she was sorry, and then I say "ok." I paid for my food and I walked out. Me and my friend went to the King of Prussia Mall and then, later, I forgot about that.

But this stuff happens to me all the time. Some stores treat me like I'm a celebrity. Some stores don't have those people skills. People have this low expectation when it comes to individuals that have intellectual disabilities.

I blame society for that image that they have ingrained in people about intellectual disability. People have this notion, right, that if you have a disability, you want someone to have pity on you. That you is incompetent. Basically, they want to keep you like a child. If we look back in history, that's how they always used to treat us. If we try to be smart, they try to dumb us down. And then you don't see us on no major news networks or in a mainstream profession or in mainstream entertainment like a professional model or TV star. We fight for all these causes but somehow people with Intellectual disabilities get left behind. And that is a major, major problem.

So, after that incident in the pizza store, I started to develop my own business to train people on disabilities bias and disability etiquette. I've trained police officers and I've trained sororities. I teach them about disability history. I give them eight rules – the do's and don'ts about communicating with people with disabilities. People don't realize that what they're doing is not ok, and they thank me for the training.

It's time for a change because, just like we is fighting for equal justice for African Americans, I think that this moment will also pave the way for people with disabilities. Just like Dr Martin Luther King said, men, women and children should be equal. Who knows when I'll go back to that pizza store? If I ever go back, maybe they will have a different mindset about people with disabilities. I feel hopeful.