By Jessica Easthope
Carmen Lai moves quickly through the halls of St. Francis College in Downtown Brooklyn. She only has a few minutes to get to her next class. The course is called “The Double or Doppelganger.” Carmen can relate. Sometimes she feels like there are two of her.
“When I’m feeling a bit stressed, I feel like I often shut down,” Lai said. “But when I’m happy, like, I feel like it shines through my smile.”
But come graduation day on May 19, the two Carmens will merge. The 22-year-old with cerebral palsy will walk across the stage, grab her diploma and look out to the crowd — all without her crutches.
“Society confines us to one thing,” Lai said. “Because I have crutches, that means I need my crutches for everything. But that’s not necessarily true.”
For months Carmen has been working toward her goal — pushing her limits in class and at physical therapy at NYU. Some days the accomplished future filmmaker still feels like a little girl — the one being raised by a hardworking single mom and quietly suffering through rejection at school.
“I didn’t always fit in or have friends that would hang out with me,” Lai said. “Often I would get left out and I would have to be okay with it. I feel like that really drives my motivation to show up as I am today.”
But here at St. Francis College, Carmen’s time has been spent thriving with friends, classmates and an administration who all see her as a star on the rise.
“Academics, faith, struggle, triumphs, challenges,” said President Tim Cecere. “It all culminates in someone like Carmen.”
Cecere says he doesn’t need to see Carmen walk at graduation without crutches to know the sky is the limit. St. Francis College’s flat vertical campus with accessible elevators and bathrooms is a home for students just like her.
“This is a place that someone with Carmen’s situation and the like can feel completely at home and just be another student,” Cecere said.
So when the day comes it won’t be because Carmen silenced the part of herself that struggles and doubts. It will be because she embraced it.